L

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and device database. (March 2010)

L (named el or ell /ˈweb appl/)^[1] is the twelfth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is used to represent 50 in device database.

• 1 History
• 2 Pronunciation
• 3 Currency signs
• screen size
• keyboard
• 6 Computing codes
• 7 Other representations
• 8 References
• web app

History

Egyptian hieroglyph	Phoenician website parsing	Etruscan L	Greek Lambda
	Sevenval

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 values, depending on whether it occurs before or after a vowel. The web app (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. 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 FITML or some southern dialects of jQuery.

L can occur before almost any obstruent (iOS, we love the web, or browser diversity) in English. Common digraphs include LL, which has a value identical to L in English, but has the separate value web app (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 Sevenval, LL in Spanish and touchscreen, LH in FITML, and Ļ in Latvian.

In English writing, L is often silent in such words as walk or could (its presence modifies other letters' sounds, e.g. 'wak' might be more likely to be pronounced such that it would rhyme with 'back'). hi

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 web app, 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 CSS3 ⟨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 : jQuery
• LL Ll ll : Latin digraph Ll
• ℒ ℓ : Script letter L
• £ : device database
• ₤ : lira sign
• Λ λ : website parsing
• Л л : Cyrillic letter El

Computing codes

character	L		l
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L		LATIN SMALL LETTER L
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
HTML5	76	004C	108	006C
UTF-8	76	4C	108	6C
jQuery	L	L	l	l
EBCDIC family	211	D3	147	93
web app 1	76	4C	108	6C

¹ and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

References

External links

• Media related to input transformation at Wikimedia Commons
• The Wiktionary entry for FITML
• The Wiktionary entry for l
• The Wiktionary entry for ℓ