L is the twelfth letter of the
Latin alphabet. Its name in
English is
el or occasionally
ell ().
History
The letter
L is derived ultimately from the
Semitic crook or
goad which stood for . This originally may have been based on an Egyptian
hieroglyph that was adapted by Semites for alphabetic purposes. The Greek letter
Lambda Λ (upper case) or λ (lower case), as well as the equivalent
Etruscan and Latin letters, represent the same sound as the Semitic letter. In reference, it is spelled
el or
ell.
Pronunciation
In
English,
L can have several values, depending on whether it occurs before or after a vowel. The
alveolar lateral approximant (the sound which the
IPA uses the lowercase to represent) occurs before a vowel, as in
lip or
please, while the
velarized alveolar lateral approximant (IPA ) occurs in
bell and
milk (see
Dark L). This velarization does not occur in many European languages that use
L; it is also a factor making the pronunciation of
L difficult for users of languages that either lack, or have different values, for
L, such as
Japanese or some southern dialects of
Chinese.
L can occur before almost any
plosive,
fricative, or
affricate in English. Common digraphs include
LL, which has a value identical to
L in English, but has the separate value
voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (IPA ) in
Welsh, where it can appear in an initial position.
A palatal
L (IPA ) occurs in many languages, and is represented by
GL in
Italian,
LL in certain varieties of
Spanish,
LH in
Portuguese, and
Ļ in
Latvian.
In English writing,
L is often silent in such words as
walk or
could (its presence modifies other letters' sounds, i.e. 'wak' might be more likely to be pronounced such that it would rhyme with 'back').
Codes for computing
In
Unicode the
capital L is codepoint U+004C and the
lowercase l is U+006C. In some fonts, a lowercase l may be difficult to distinguish from a 1(one) or an uppercase letter I(
i). A more stylized version based on the handwritten ℓ is sometimes used - this is often used as a suffix on a number to represent
litres. Its codepoint is U+2113 and its numeric character reference is "
ℓ". Capital I(i) can also be hard to distinguish from a lowercase l(L), as many fonts use a vertical bar for both of these characters. In recent times, many new fonts have curved the lowercase form to the right and is increasingly common, especially on European road signs and advertisements.
The
ASCII code for capital L is 76 and for lowercase l is 108; or in
binary 01001100 and 01101100, correspondingly.
The
EBCDIC code for capital L is 211 and for lowercase l is 147.
The
numeric character references in
HTML and
XML are "
L" and "
l" for upper and lower case respectively.
See also
