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Please help improve this article b y adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2010) This article is about the letter. For other uses, see L (disambiguation). ISO basic Latin alphabet Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz L ( /'?l/; named el or ell)[1] is the twelfth letter of the ISO basic Latin alph abet. Contents [hide] 1 History 2 Pronunciation 3 Currency signs 4 Form 5 Related letters and other similar characters 6 Computing codes 7 Other representations 8 References 9 External links [edit] HistoryEgyptian hieroglyph Phoenician lamedh Etruscan L Greek Lambda

Lamedh may have come from a pictogram of an ox goad or cattle prod. Some have su ggested a shepherd's staff. [edit] PronunciationIn English, L can have several values, depending on whether it occurs before or after a vowel. The alveolar lateral approximant (the sound w hich the IPA uses the lowercase [l] to represent) occurs before a vowel, as in l ip or please, while the velarized alveolar lateral approximant (IPA [?]) occurs in bell and milk (see Velarized alveolar lateral approximant). This velarization does not occur in many European languages that use L; it is also a factor makin g the pronunciation of L difficult for users of languages that either lack, or h ave different values, for L, such as Japanese or some southern dialects of Chine se. L can occur before almost any plosive, fricative, or affricate in English. Commo n digraphs include LL, which has a value identical to L in English, but has the separate value voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (IPA /?/) in Welsh, where it can appear in an initial position. A palatal lateral approximant or palatal L (IPA /?/) occurs in many languages, a nd is represented by GL in Italian, LL in Spanish and Catalan, LH in Portuguese, and L in Latvian.

In English writing, L is often silent in such words as walk or could (its presen ce modifies other letters' sounds, e.g. 'wak' might be more likely to be pronoun ced such that it would rhyme with 'back'). [edit] Currency signsThe capital letter L is used as the currency sign for the A lbanian lek and the Honduran lempira. It was often used, especially in handwriti ng, 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. [edit] FormIn some fonts, the lowercase letter L ?l? may be difficult to disting uish 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 com mon, especially on European road signs and advertisements. A more stylized versi on 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 ch aracter reference is "ℓ". [edit] Related letters and other similar charactersL l : Latin letter L with str oke LL Ll ll : Latin digraph Ll L l : Script letter L : pound sign : lira sign ? ? : Greek letter Lambda ? ? : Cyrillic letter El [edit] Computing codescharacter L l Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L LATIN SMALL LETTER L character encoding decimal hex decimal hex Unicode 76 004C 108 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 and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Mac intosh families of encodings. [edit] Other representationsNATO phonetic Morse code Lima Signal flag Flag semaphore Braille [edit] References1.^ "L" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989) Merriam-W ebster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. (1993); "el", "ells", op. cit. [edit] External links Media related to L at Wikimedia Commons The Wiktionary entry for L The Wiktionary entry for l The Wiktionary entry for l

The ISO basic Latin alphabet v t e Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz Letter L with diacritics Ll Ll Ll ?? ?? ?? ?? Ll ?? ?l ?? ?? ? ? ? ? Related History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of lette s ISO/IEC 646 Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=L&oldid=483236929"

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