Look up M or m in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

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 basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /ˈɛm/) is spelled em.^[1]

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

[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 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].

[edit] 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.

[edit] See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: M

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

[edit] References

The Basic modern 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
Letter M with diacritics ḾḿṀṁṂṃᵯᶆⱮɱ history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646