M

M
ISO basic Laitin alphabet

Cursive script 'm' and capital 'M' in the U.S. D'Nealian script style

M (named em /ˈɛm/)^[1] is the thirteent letter o the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History

The letter M is derived frae the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu (Μ, μ). Semitic Mem probably oreeginally pictured watter. It is kent that Semitic fowk workin in Egyp c. 2000 BC borrowed a hieroglyph for "watter" that wis first uised for an alveolar nasal (/n/), acause o the Egyptian wird for watter, n-t. This same seembol acame uised for /m/ in Semitic, acause the wird for watter began wi that soond.

Egyptian hieroglyph "N"

Phoenician
Mem

Etruscan M

Greek
Mu

Roman M

The letter 'm' represents the bilabial consonant soond, [m], in Classical leids as well as the modren leids. The Oxford Inglis Dictionary (first edeetion) says that 'm' is whiles a vowel in wirds lik spasm an in the suffix -ism. In modren terminology, this wad be describit as a syllabic consonant — IPA [m̩].

Relatit letters an ither similar characters

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

Computin codes

Character	M		m
Unicode name	LATIN CAIPITAL LETTER M		LATIN SMAA LETTER M
Encodins	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	77	U+004D	109	U+006D
UTF-8	77	4D	109	6D
Numeric chairacter reference	M	M	m	m
EBCDIC faimily	212	D4	148	94
ASCII ¹	77	4D	109	6D

¹ An aa for encodings based on ASCII, includin the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 an Macintosh faimilies o encodins.

Ither representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Mike	––

		[[File:Sign language {{{fingerspelling}}}.svg\|90px]]
Seegnal banner	Banner semaphore	American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspellin)	Braille dots-134

References

↑ "M" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "em," op. cit.

Freemit airtins

Media relatit tae M at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionar defineetion o M at Wiktionary
The dictionar defineetion o m at Wiktionary

The ISO basic Laitin alphabet v t e
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
Derivations Diacritics History ISO/IEC 646 Leet o letters Numerals Palaeography Punctuation Unicode

[1] "M" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "em," op. cit.

[1]