In a writing system , a letter is a grapheme that generally corresponds to a phoneme —the smallest functional unit of speech—though there is rarely total one-to-one correspondence between the two. An alphabet is a writing system that uses letters.
22-636: M , or m , is the thirteenth letter of the Latin alphabet , used in the modern English alphabet , the alphabets of several western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is em (pronounced / ˈ ɛ m / ), plural ems . The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem via the Greek Mu (Μ, μ). Semitic Mem is most likely derived from a " Proto-Sinaitic " ( Bronze Age ) adoption of
44-509: A lowercase form (also called minuscule ). Upper- and lowercase letters represent the same sound, but serve different functions in writing. Capital letters are most often used at the beginning of a sentence, as the first letter of a proper name or title, or in headers or inscriptions. They may also serve other functions, such as in the German language where all nouns begin with capital letters. The terms uppercase and lowercase originated in
66-539: A variety of modern uses in mathematics, science, and engineering . People and objects are sometimes named after letters, for one of these reasons: The word letter entered Middle English c. 1200 , borrowed from the Old French letre . It eventually displaced the previous Old English term bōcstæf ' bookstaff '. Letter ultimately descends from the Latin littera , which may have been derived from
88-505: A voiced bilabial nasal /m/ , while upper-case ⟨M⟩ represents a voiceless bilabial nasal /m̥/ . In the International Phonetic Alphabet , ⟨m⟩ represents the voiced bilabial nasal /m/ . [REDACTED] Letter (alphabet) A letter is a type of grapheme , the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes ,
110-465: A code point is a numerical value that maps to a specific character . In character encoding code points usually represent a single grapheme —usually a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or whitespace—but sometimes represent symbols, control characters , or formatting. The set of all possible code points within a given encoding/character set make up that encoding's codespace . For example, the character encoding scheme ASCII comprises 128 code points in
132-442: A multitude of formal information processing and telecommunication standards. For example ITU-T Recommendation T.35 contains a set of country codes for telecommunications equipment (originally fax machines) which allow equipment to indicate its country of manufacture or operation. In T.35, Argentina is represented by the code point 0x07, Canada by 0x20, Gambia by 0x41, etc. Code points are commonly used in character encoding , where
154-504: A single code space. The concept of a code point dates to the earliest standards for digital information processing and digital telecommunications. In Unicode, code points are part of Unicode's solution to a difficult conundrum faced by character encoding developers in the 1980s. If they added more bits per character to accommodate larger character sets, that design decision would also constitute an unacceptable waste of then-scarce computing resources for Latin script users (who constituted
176-587: Is 17 × 65,536 = 1,114,112. For Unicode, the particular sequence of bits is called a code unit – for the UCS-4 encoding, any code point is encoded as 4- byte ( octet ) binary numbers , while in the UTF-8 encoding, different code points are encoded as sequences from one to four bytes long, forming a self-synchronizing code . See comparison of Unicode encodings for details. Code points are normally assigned to abstract characters . An abstract character
198-513: Is a particular position in a table , where the position has been assigned a meaning. The table may be one dimensional (a column), two dimensional (like cells in a spreadsheet), three dimensional (sheets in a workbook), etc... in any number of dimensions. Technically, a code point is a unique position in a quantized n-dimensional space, where the position has been assigned a semantic meaning. The table has discrete (whole) and positive positions (1, 2, 3, 4, but not fractions). Code points are used in
220-456: Is considered to be a separate letter from ⟨n⟩ , though this distinction is not usually recognised in English dictionaries. In computer systems, each has its own code point , U+006E n LATIN SMALL LETTER N and U+00F1 ñ LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE , respectively. Letters may also function as numerals with assigned numerical values, for example with Roman numerals . Greek and Latin letters have
242-427: Is indicated by the existence of precomposed characters for use with computer systems (for example, ⟨á⟩ , ⟨à⟩ , ⟨ä⟩ , ⟨â⟩ , ⟨ã⟩ .) In the following table, letters from multiple different writing systems are shown, to demonstrate the variety of letters used throughout the world. Code point A code point , codepoint or code position
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#1732845330998264-456: Is not a graphical glyph but a unit of textual data. However, code points may also be left reserved for future assignment (most of the Unicode code space is unassigned), or given other designated functions. The distinction between a code point and the corresponding abstract character is not pronounced in Unicode but is evident for many other encoding schemes, where numerous code pages may exist for
286-451: Is sometimes a vowel , such as in words like spasm and in the suffix -ism . In modern terminology, this is described as a syllabic consonant (IPA: /m̩/ ). M is the fourteenth most frequently used letter in the English language. The letter ⟨m⟩ represents the voiced bilabial nasal /m/ in the orthography of Latin as well as in those of many modern languages . In Washo , lower-case ⟨m⟩ represents
308-638: The "water" ideogram in Egyptian writing . The Egyptian sign had the acrophonic value /n/ , from the Egyptian word for "water", nt ; the adoption as the Semitic letter for /m/ was presumably also on acrophonic grounds, from the Semitic word for "water", *mā(y)- . In English , ⟨m⟩ represents the voiced bilabial nasal /m/ . The Oxford English Dictionary (first edition) says that ⟨m⟩
330-641: The Greek diphthera 'writing tablet' via Etruscan . Until the 19th century, letter was also used interchangeably to refer to a speech segment . Before alphabets, phonograms , graphic symbols of sounds, were used. There were three kinds of phonograms: verbal, pictures for entire words, syllabic, which stood for articulations of words, and alphabetic, which represented signs or letters. The earliest examples of which are from Ancient Egypt and Ancient China, dating to c. 3000 BCE . The first consonantal alphabet emerged around c. 1800 BCE , representing
352-758: The Phoenicians, Semitic workers in Egypt. Their script was originally written and read from right to left. From the Phoenician alphabet came the Etruscan and Greek alphabets. From there, the most widely used alphabet today emerged, Latin, which is written and read from left to right. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters, nineteen of which the Latin alphabet used, and the Greek alphabet, adapted c. 900 BCE , added four letters to those used in Phoenician. This Greek alphabet
374-438: The days of handset type for printing presses. Individual letter blocks were kept in specific compartments of drawers in a type case. Capital letters were stored in a higher drawer or upper case. In most alphabetic scripts, diacritics (or accents) are a routinely used. English is unusual in not using them except for loanwords from other languages or personal names (for example, naïve , Brontë ). The ubiquity of this usage
396-622: The distinct forms of ⟨S⟩ , the Greek sigma ⟨Σ⟩ , and Cyrillic es ⟨С⟩ each represent analogous /s/ phonemes. Letters are associated with specific names, which may differ between languages and dialects. Z , for example, is usually called zed outside of the United States, where it is named zee . Both ultimately derive from the name of the parent Greek letter zeta ⟨Ζ⟩ . In alphabets, letters are arranged in alphabetical order , which also may vary by language. In Spanish, ⟨ñ⟩
418-571: The late 7th and early 8th centuries. Finally, many slight letter additions and drops were made to the common alphabet used in the western world. Minor changes were made such as the removal of certain letters, such as thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩ , wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ , and eth ⟨Ð ð⟩ . A letter can have multiple variants, or allographs , related to variation in style of handwriting or printing . Some writing systems have two major types of allographs for each letter: an uppercase form (also called capital or majuscule ) and
440-406: The range 0 hex to 7F hex , Extended ASCII comprises 256 code points in the range 0 hex to FF hex , and Unicode comprises 1,114,112 code points in the range 0 hex to 10FFFF hex . The Unicode code space is divided into seventeen planes (the basic multilingual plane, and 16 supplementary planes), each with 65,536 (= 2 ) code points. Thus the total size of the Unicode code space
462-663: The smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called a multigraph . Multigraphs include digraphs of two letters (e.g. English ch , sh , th ), and trigraphs of three letters (e.g. English tch ). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H , Greek eta ⟨Η⟩ , and Cyrillic en ⟨Н⟩ are homoglyphs , but represent different phonemes. Conversely,
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#1732845330998484-504: Was the first to assign letters not only to consonant sounds, but also to vowels . The Roman Empire further developed and refined the Latin alphabet, beginning around 500 BCE. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the development of lowercase letters began to emerge in Roman writing. At this point, paragraphs, uppercase and lowercase letters, and the concept of sentences and clauses still had not emerged; these final bits of development emerged in
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