M

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For other uses, see M (disambiguation).
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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 is the thirteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet, pronounced em [ɛm] in English. In English words, it generally represents the bilabial nasal denoted by the International Phonetic Alphabet symbol [m].

Contents

  • 1 History
  • 2 Codes for computing
  • 3 Meanings of M
  • 4 See also

[edit] 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 speculated 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. However in certain parts of South India (Kerala) it is pronounced as [jem].

Egyptian hieroglyph "N" Proto-Semitic M Phoenician M Etruscan M Greek Mu Roman M
n

The letter M represents the bilabial nasal 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].

[edit] Codes for computing

Alternative representations of M
NATO phonetic Morse code
Mike ––
Signal flag Semaphore ASL Manual Braille

In Unicode the capital M is codepoint U+004D and the lowercase 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.

[edit] Meanings of M

See M (disambiguation).