L is the twelfth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /ˈɛl/) is spelled el or occasionally ell.
The letter L is derived from the Egyptian crook or goad which stood for /l/. This originally may have been based on an Egyptian hieroglyph that was adapted by Semites for alphabetic purposes. The Greek letter Lambda Λ (upper case) or λ (lower case), as well as the equivalent Etruscan and Latin letters, represent the same sound as the Semitic letter.
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 Dark L). 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.
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 Unicode the capital L is codepoint U+004C and the lowercase l is U+006C. In some fonts, a lowercase l may be difficult to distinguish from a 1 (one) or an uppercase letter I (i). A more stylized version based on the handwritten ℓ is sometimes used - this is often used as a suffix on a number to represent litres. Its codepoint is U+2113 and its numeric character reference is "ℓ". Capital I (i) can also be hard to distinguish from a lowercase l (L), as many fonts use a vertical bar for both of these characters. In recent times, many new fonts have curved the lower-case form to the right and is increasingly common, especially on European road signs and advertisements.
The EBCDIC code for capital L is 211 and for lowercase l is 147.
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646
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