M

Look up M or m in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

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)^[1] 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 their word for water began with that sound.

Egyptian hieroglyph "N"	Proto-Semitic M	Phoenician mem	Etruscan M	Greek mu	Roman M

The letter M represents the bilabial consonant sound, IPA: [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]

Codes for computing

Alternative representations of M

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Mike	––

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

In Unicode the capital M is codepoint U+004D and the lower case m is U+006D.

The ASCII code for capital M is 77 and for lowercase m is 109; or in binary 01001101 and 01101101, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital M is 212 and for lowercase m is 148.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "M" and "m" for upper and lower case respectively.

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: M

• М, м - Em (Cyrillic)
• Μ, μ - Mu (Greek)

References