L
 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (March 2010) |
 |
| ISO basic Latin alphabet |
|---|
| AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz |
L (/[invalid input: 'icon']ˈɛl/; named el or ell)[1] is the twelfth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
History
| Egyptian hieroglyph | Phoenician lamedh |
Etruscan L | Greek Lambda | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
Lamedh may have come from a pictogram of an ox goad or cattle prod. Some have suggested a shepherd's staff.
Pronunciation
In English, L 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.
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 GL 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, e.g. 'wak' might be more likely to be pronounced such that it would rhyme with 'back').
Currency signs
The capital letter L is used as the currency sign for the Albanian lek and the Honduran lempira. It was often used, especially in handwriting, as the currency sign for the Italian Lira. It is also infrequently used as a substitute for the pound sign, which is based on it.
Form
In some fonts, the lowercase letter L ⟨l⟩ may be difficult to distinguish from the digit one ⟨1⟩ or an uppercase letter I ⟨I⟩. In recent times, many new fonts have curved the lowercase form to the right and it is increasingly common, especially on European road signs and advertisements. 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".
Related letters and other similar characters
- Ł ł : Latin letter L with stroke
- LL Ll ll : Latin digraph Ll
- ℒ ℓ : Script letter L
- £ : pound sign
- ₤ : lira sign
- Λ λ : Greek letter Lambda
- Л л : Cyrillic letter El
Computing codes
| character | L | l | ||
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L | LATIN SMALL LETTER L | ||
| character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 76 | 004C | 108 | 006C |
| UTF-8 | 76 | 4C | 108 | 6C |
| Numeric character reference | L | L | l | l |
| EBCDIC family | 211 | D3 | 147 | 93 |
| ASCII 1 | 76 | 4C | 108 | 6C |
1 and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Other representations
| NATO phonetic | Morse code |
| Lima |
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.
