Writing cursive forms of M
M (named em )[1] is the 13th letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet .
History [ edit ]
The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem , via the Greek Mu (Μ, μ). Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water . It is thought 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 the word for water began with that sound.
Use in writing systems [ edit ]
The letter ⟨m⟩ represents the bilabial nasal consonant sound [m ] in the orthography of Latin as well as in that of many modern languages , and also in the International Phonetic Alphabet . In English, 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 is described as a syllabic consonant (IPA [m̩] ).
Other uses [ edit ]
The Roman numeral Ⅿ represents the number 1000 , though it was not used in Roman times.[2]
Related characters [ edit ]
Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet [ edit ]
Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets [ edit ]
𐤌 : Semitic letter Mem , from which the following symbols originally derive
Μ μ : Greek letter Mu , from which M derives
Ⲙ ⲙ : Coptic letter Me, which derives from Greek Mu
М м : Cyrillic letter Em , also derived from Mu
𐌌 : Old Italic M, which derives from Greek Mu, and is the ancestor of modern Latin M
ᛗ : Runic letter Mannaz , which derives from old Italic M
𐌼 : Gothic letter manna, which derives from Greek Mu
Ligatures and abbreviations [ edit ]
Computing codes [ edit ]
Character
M
m
Unicode name
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER M
LATIN SMALL LETTER M
Encodings
decimal
hex
decimal
hex
Unicode
77
U+004D
109
U+006D
UTF-8
77
4D
109
6D
Numeric character reference
M
M
m
m
EBCDIC family
212
D4
148
94
ASCII 1
77
4D
109
6D
1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Other representations [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
External links [ edit ]
Media related to M at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionary definition of M at Wiktionary
The dictionary definition of m at Wiktionary