L


L, or l, is the twelfth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is el, plural els.

History

Lamedh may have come from a pictogram of an ox goad or cattle prod. Some have suggested that it represents a shepherd's staff.

Typographic variants

In most sans-serif typefaces, the lowercase letter ell, written as the glyph, may be difficult to distinguish from the uppercase letter "eye" ; in some serif typefaces, the glyph may be confused with the glyph, the digit one. To avoid such confusion, some newer computer fonts have a finial, a curve to the right at the bottom of the lowercase letter ell. Other style variants are provided in script typefaces and display typefaces. All these variants of the letter are encoded in Unicode as or, allowing presentation to be chosen according to each context. For specialist mathematical and scientific use, there are a number of dedicated codepoints in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block.
In the Romain du Roi, where the ascenders of lowercase letters have symmetrical serifs at the top, has an extra serif to the left at the mean line to distinguish it from capital.
Another means of reducing such confusion is to use symbol, which is a cursive, handwriting-style lowercase form of the letter "ell". In Japan and Korea, for example, this is the symbol for the liter. In Unicode, the cursive form is encoded as from the "letter-like symbols" block. Unicode encodes an explicit symbol as. The TeX syntax renders it as. In mathematical formulas, an italic form of the script ℓ is the norm.

Use in writing systems

English

In English orthography, usually represents the phoneme, which can have several sound values, depending on the speaker's accent, and whether it occurs before or after a vowel. In Received Pronunciation, the alveolar lateral approximant occurs before a vowel, as in lip or blend, while the velarized [alveolar lateral approximant] occurs in bell and milk. This velarization does not occur in many European languages that use ; it is also a factor making the pronunciation of difficult for users of languages that lack or have different values for it, such as Japanese or some southern dialects of Chinese. A medical condition or speech impediment restricting the pronunciation of is known as lambdacism.
In English orthography, is often silent in such words as walk or could, and it is usually silent in such words as palm and psalm; however, there is some regional variation. L is the eleventh most frequently used letter in the English language.

Other languages

usually represents the sound or some other lateral consonant. Common digraphs include, which has a value identical to in English, but has the separate value voiceless alveolar lateral fricative in Welsh, where it can appear in an initial position. In Spanish, represents .
A palatal lateral approximant or palatal occurs in many languages, and is represented by in Italian, in Spanish and Catalan, in Portuguese, and in Latvian.
In Turkish, generally represents, but represents before,,, or.
In Washo, lower-case represents a typical sound, while upper-case represents a voiceless sound, a bit like double in Welsh.

Other systems

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses to represent the voiced alveolar lateral approximant and a small cap to represent the voiced velar lateral approximant.

Other uses

Related characters

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

Derived signs, symbols and abbreviations

Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

  • ? : Semitic letter Lamedh, from which the following symbols originally derive
  • *Λ λ : Greek letter Lambda, from which the following letters derive
  • **Л л : Cyrillic letter El
  • **Ⲗⲗ : Coptic letter Lamda
  • **? : Old Italic letter L, which is the ancestor of modern Latin L
  • ***ᛚ : Runic letter laguz, which might derive from old Italic L
  • **? : Gothic letter laaz

Other representations

Computing

The Latin letters and have Unicode encodings and. These are the same code points as those used in ASCII and ISO 8859. There are also precomposed character encodings for and with diacritics, for most of those listed above; the remainder are produced using combining diacritics.
Variant forms of the letter have unique code points for specialist use: the alphanumeric symbols set in mathematics and science, and halfwidth and fullwidth forms for legacy CJK font compatibility.