M

This article is about the letter. For other uses, see M (disambiguation).

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 ( /ˈɛm/; named em) is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.

History

The letter M is derived 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 the word for water began with that sound.

Egyptian hieroglyph "N"	Phoenician mem	Etruscan M	Greek mu	Roman M

The letter ⟨m⟩ represents the bilabial consonant sound, [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]

Related letters and other similar characters

• Μ μ : Greek letter Mu
• М м : Cyrillic letter Em

Computing codes

character	M		m
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER M		LATIN SMALL LETTER M
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	77	004D	109	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 and all 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

External links

• Media related to M at Wikimedia Commons
• The Wiktionary entry for M
• The Wiktionary entry for m

The 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
Letter M with diacritics
Ḿḿ	Ṁṁ	Ṃṃ	ᵯ	ᶆ	Ɱɱ
Related
History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of letters ISO/IEC 646