M

Writing cursive forms of M

M (named em /ˈɛm/)^[1] is the 13th letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History

Egyptian hieroglyph "n"	-Phoenician Mem	Etruscan M	Greek Mu	Roman M

The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu (Îœ, Î¼). 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

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

The Roman numeral â…¯ represents the number 1000, though it was not used in Roman times.^[2]

Related characters

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

• M with diacritics: Ḿ ḿ á¹€ ṁ Ṃ ṃ
• IPA-specific symbols related to M: ɱ

Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

• 𐤌 : Semitic letter Mem, from which the following symbols originally derive
• Îœ μ : Greek letter Mu, from which M derives
• Ðœ м : Cyrillic letter Em, also derived from Mu
• Ⲙ â²™ : Coptic letter Me, which derives from Greek Mu
• 𐌌 : Old Italic M, which derives from Greek Mu, and is the ancestor of modern Latin M
• á›— : Runic letter Mannaz, which derives from old Italic M
• 𐌼 : Gothic letter manna, which derives from Greek Mu

Ligatures and abbreviations

• â‚¥ : Mill (currency)
• â„¢ : Trademark symbol
• â„  : Service mark symbol

Computing codes

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

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Mike	––

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille dots-134

References

1. "M" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "em," op. cit.
2. Gordon, Arthur E. (1983). Illustrated Introduction to Latin Epigraphy. University of California Press. p. 45. Retrieved 3 October 2015.

External links

• Media related to M at Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of M at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of m at Wiktionary