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M is the thirteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
. Its name in English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 is spelled em .

letter M derives its shape from the Phoenician
Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC. It was used for the writing of Phoenician language, a Northern Semitic languages language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia....
 Mem
Mem

Mem is the thirteenth letter of many Semitic languages abjads, including Phoenician alphabet, Aramaic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet and Arabic alphabet ....
, via the Greek
Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
 Mu
Mu (letter)

Mu is the 12th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 40. Mu was derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol for water which had been simplified by the Phoenicians and named after their word for water, to become Mem ....
 (?, 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
Alveolar nasal

The alveolar nasal is a type of consonantal sound used in numerous spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental consonant, alveolar consonant, and postalveolar consonant nasal consonant is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is n....
 (because of the Egyptian word for Water, "n-t".






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Quotations


Children:

singing Just you wait a little while, the nasty man in black will come. With his little chopper, he will chop you up!






Encyclopedia


M is the thirteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
. Its name in English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 is spelled em .

History

The letter M derives its shape from the Phoenician
Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC. It was used for the writing of Phoenician language, a Northern Semitic languages language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia....
 Mem
Mem

Mem is the thirteenth letter of many Semitic languages abjads, including Phoenician alphabet, Aramaic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet and Arabic alphabet ....
, via the Greek
Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
 Mu
Mu (letter)

Mu is the 12th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 40. Mu was derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol for water which had been simplified by the Phoenicians and named after their word for water, to become Mem ....
 (?, 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
Alveolar nasal

The alveolar nasal is a type of consonantal sound used in numerous spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental consonant, alveolar consonant, and postalveolar consonant nasal consonant is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is 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
Nasal consonant

A nasal consonant is produced with a lowered soft palate in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound, but the air does not escape through the mouth as it is blocked by the tongue....
 sound, , in Classical languages as well as the modern language
Language

A language is a form of symbol communication in which elements are combined to represents something other than themselves. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon....
s. The Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press , is a comprehensive dictionary of the English language. Two fully-bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989; as of December 2008 the dictionary's current editors have completed a quarter of the third edition....
 (first edition) says that 'm' is sometimes a vowel
Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis....
 in words like spasm and in the suffix -ism. In modern terminology, this would be described as a syllabic consonant
Syllabic consonant

A syllabic consonant is a consonant which either forms a syllable on its own, or is the nucleus of a syllable. The diacritic for this in the International Phonetic Alphabet is the under-stroke, , at Unicode code point U+329....
 — IPA .

Codes for computing


In Unicode
Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
 the capital M is codepoint U+004D and the lower case m is U+006D.

The ASCII
ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange , is a coding standard that can be used for interchanging information, if the information is expressed mainly by the written form of English words....
 code for capital M is 77 and for lowercase m is 109; or in binary
Binary numeral system

The binary numeral system, or notation with a radix of 2. Owing to its straightforward implementation in digital electronic circuitry using logic gates, the binary system is used internally by all modern computers....
 01001101 and 01101101, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC
EBCDIC

Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is an 8-bit character encoding used on IBM mainframe operating systems such as z/OS, OS/390, VM and VSE , as well as IBM midrange computer operating systems such as OS/400 and i5/OS ....
 code for capital M is 212 and for lowercase m is 148.

The numeric character reference
Numeric character reference

A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-based markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of character s that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode....
s in HTML
HTML

HTML, an Acronym and initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for Web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document?by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on?and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded '...
 and XML are "M" and "m" for upper and lower case respectively.

See also

  • ?, ? - Em (Cyrillic)
    Em (Cyrillic)

    Em is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, representing a bilabial nasal consonant unless it is before a palatalization vowel when it represents . It is derived from the Greek letter mu ....
  • ?, µ - Mu (Greek)
    Mu (letter)

    Mu is the 12th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 40. Mu was derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol for water which had been simplified by the Phoenicians and named after their word for water, to become Mem ....