L

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

L ( /ˈɛl/; named el or ell)[1] is the twelfth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.

Contents

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 is also infrequently used as a substitute for the pound sign, which it resembles.

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

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 ·–··
Signal flag Flag semaphore Braille

References

  1. ^ "L" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989) Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. (1993); "el", "ells", op. cit.

External links

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 L with diacritics
Ĺĺ Ľľ Ļļ Ḷḷ Ḹḹ Ḽḽ Ḻḻ Łł Ŀŀ Ƚƚ Ⱡⱡ Ɫɫ ɬ ᶅ ɭ ȴ
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