M is the thirteenth letter of the
basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in
English () is spelled
em.
History
The letter
M derives its shape 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 (, 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.
The letter M represents the
bilabial consonant sound, , 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 .
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
