M

Basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh
Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn
Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt
Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

M ( /ˈɛm/; named em)^[1] is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.

Contents 1 History 2 Codes for computing 3 See also 4 References

History

The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu (Μ, μ). Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water. It is known that Semitic people working in Egypt c. 2000 BC borrowed a hieroglyph for "water" that was first used for an alveolar nasal (/n/, because of the Egyptian word for water, "n-t". This same symbol became used for M in Semitic, because their word for water began with that sound.

Egyptian hieroglyph "N"	Proto-Semitic M	Phoenician mem	Etruscan M	Greek mu	Roman M

The letter M represents the bilabial consonant sound, IPA: [m], in Classical languages as well as the modern languages. The Oxford English Dictionary (first edition) says that 'm' is sometimes a vowel in words like spasm and in the suffix -ism. In modern terminology, this would be described as a syllabic consonant — IPA [m̩]

Codes for computing

In Unicode the capital M is codepoint U+004D and the lower case m is U+006D.

The ASCII code for capital M is 77 and for lowercase m is 109; or in binary 01001101 and 01101101, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital M is 212 and for lowercase m is 148.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "M" and "m" for upper and lower case respectively.

See also

• М, м - Em (Cyrillic)
• Μ, μ - Mu (Greek)

References

Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Letter M with diacritics ḾḿṀṁṂṃᵯᶆⱮɱ history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646