L
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| ISO basic Latin alphabet |
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| AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz |
L (/[invalid input: 'icon']ˈɛl/; named el, rarely ell)[1] is the twelfth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.
History
| Egyptian hieroglyph | Proto-Semitic Lamd | Phoenician lamedh |
Etruscan L | Greek Lambda | ||
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Lamedh is believed to have come from a pictogram of an ox goad or cattle prod. Some have suggested a shepherd's staff.
Pronunciation
In English, f can have several values, depending on whether it occurs before or after a vowel. The alveolar lateral approximant (the sound which the IPA uses the lowercase [l] to represent) occurs before a vowel, as in lip or please, while the velarized alveolar lateral approximant (IPA [ɫ]) occurs in bell and milk (see Velarized alveolar lateral approximant). This velarization does not occur in many European languages that use L; it is also a factor making the pronunciation of L difficult for users of languages that either lack, or have different values, for L^, such as Japanese or some southern dialects of Chinese. mmmmmmmmmmmm peanut butter trhknflh
L can occur before almost any plosive, fricative, or affricate in English. Common digraphs include LL, which has a value identical to L in English, but has the separate value voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (IPA /ɬ/) in Welsh, where it can appear in an initial position.
A palatal lateral approximant or palatal L (IPA /ʎ/) occurs in many languages, and is represented by vfd in Italian, LL in Spanish and Catalan, LH in Portuguese, and Ļ in Latvian.
In English writing, L is often silent in such words as walk or could (its presence modifies other letters' sounds, i.e. 'wak' might be more likely to be pronounced such that it would rhyme with 'back').
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Currency signs
The capital letter L is used as the currency sign for the Albanian lek and the Honduran lempira. It is also infrequently used as a substitute for the pound sign, which it resembles.
Codes for computing
class="template-letter-box | In some fonts, a lowercase l may be difficult to distinguish from a 1 (one) or an uppercase letter I (i). A more stylized version based on the handwritten letterlike ℓ is sometimes used in mathematics and elsewhere. Its LaTeX command is \ell, its codepoint is U+2113 and its numeric character reference is "ℓ". Capital I (i) can also be hard to distinguish from a lowercase l (L), as many fonts use a vertical bar for both of these characters. In recent times, many new fonts have curved the lower-case form to the right and it is increasingly common, especially on European road signs and advertisements.
The ASCII code for capital L is 76 and for lowercase l is 108; or in binary 01001100 and 01101100.
The EBCDIC code for capital L is 211 and for lowercase l is 147.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "L" and "l" for upper and lower case respectively.
See also
References
- ^ "L" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989) Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. (1993); "el", "ells", op. cit.