ISO 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

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[edit]

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

The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu (Μ, μ). 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[edit]

The letter 'm' represents the bilabial consonant sound, [m], in the orthography of Latin, as well as in many modern languages. 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 would be described as a syllabic consonant — IPA [m̩].

Related letters and other similar characters[edit]

• Μ μ : Greek letter Mu
• М м : Cyrillic letter Em
• מ,ם : Hebrew letter Mem
• A B C D E F G H I J K L N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z (English Alphabet)

Computing codes[edit]

¹ Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations[edit]

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Mike	––

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille dots-134

References[edit]

External links[edit]

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