L

L (named el /ˈɛl/) is the twelfth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In Roman numerals it represents 50.

History

Egyptian hieroglyph	Phoenician lamedh	Etruscan L9	Greek Lambdaloollllllll

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 sound values, depending on whether it occurs before or after a vowel. The alveolar lateral approximant (the sound represented inopd lx IPA by lowercase [l]) occurs before a vowel, as in 'lip' hor 'please', while the velarized alveolar lateral approximant (IPA [ɫ]) occurs in 'bell' and 'milk'. 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 lack L or have different values for it, such as Japanese or some southern dialects of Ch[3]inese.

L can occur before almost any obstruent (stop, 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 can modify the preceding vowel letter's sound; e.g. 'wak' might be pronounced to rhyme with 'back').

Currency signs

The capital letter 'L' is used as the currency sign for the Albanian lek and the Honduran lempira. It was often used, especially in handwriting, as the currency sign for the Italian lira. It is also infrequently used as a substitute for the pound sign (£), which is based on it.

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

• Ł ł : Latin letter L with stroke
• LL Ll ll : Latin digraph Ll
• ℒ ℓ : Script letter L
• £ : pound sign
• ₤ : lira sign
• Λ λ : Greek letter Lambda
• Л л : Cyrillic letter El

Computing codes

Character information

Preview	L		l
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L		LATIN SMALL LETTER L
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	76	U+004C	108	U+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 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Lima	▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄ ⓘ

		File:Sign language .svg	File:BSL letter .svg
Signal flag	Flag semaphore	American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspelling)	British manual alphabet (BSL fingerspelling)	Braille dots-123 Unified English Braille

External links

• Media related to L at Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of L at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of l at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of ℓ at Wiktionary