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M

M is the thirteenth letter of the Latin alphabet.

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History

The letter M represents the bilabial nasal consonant sound, IPA in Classical languages as well as the modern languages. It derives its shape from the Greek Mu (Μ, μ). Semitic Mem originally pictured water, in all probability.

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].

Meanings for M

Alternate representations

Mike represents the letter M in the NATO phonetic alphabet.

In international Morse code the letter M is DahDah: - -

In Braille the letter M is represented as (in Unicode), the dot pattern:

XX
..
X.

Computing

In Unicode the capital M is codepoint U+004D and the lowercase 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

Last updated: 05-21-2005 01:35:25