M is the thirteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English ( ) is spelled em.

History

The letter M derives its shape 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.

The letter M represents the bilabial nasal consonant sound, IPA2: 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 1.

Codes for computing

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

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