General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20266 min read

Ł

Ł (lowercase ł, English name L with stroke, also called L slash or slashed l) is a letter of the Latin script formed by adding a stroke to L or l. It is encoded in Unicode as U+0141 (capital) and U+0142 (small), added in Unicode version 1.1 in 1993 in the Latin Extended-A block, and it is an atomic letter rather than an l with a combining stroke.¹^•² Its sound values include /w/ in Polish, Kashubian, and Sorbian, and /ɬ/ in a series of North American indigenous orthographies.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Unicode	U+0141 / U+0142, Latin Extended-A, encoded since Unicode 1.1 (1993); Unicode 1.0 names were LATIN SMALL LETTER L SLASH (U+0142) and LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L SLASH (U+0141)¹^•²
Encoding type	Decomposition_Type None: a single atomic letter, not l plus a combining stroke; uppercase mapping is U+0141¹
Sound in Slavic languages	/w/ in Polish, Kashubian, and Sorbian, a further development of the Proto-Slavic dark L²
Sound in North America	Voiceless alveolar lateral fricative /ɬ/ in Navajo, Inupiaq, Chipewyan, and other orthographies, as in Navajo łį́į́ʼ 'horse'³
Polish origin	Crossed ľ in Jakub Parkoszowic's treatise of about 1440; the crossed ł established by Stanisław Zaborowski's 1513 Ortographia⁴^•⁵
Graphic forms	Crossbar at the top in handwriting, diagonal stroke through the middle in print⁶
Legacy charsets	Present in ISO 8859-2 (0xA3), CP1250 (0xA3), CP775, CP852, ISO 8859-13, CP1257, and ISO 8859-16⁷

Languages using Ł

Ł is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Belarusian Latin (Łacinka), Ukrainian Latin, Wymysorys, Navajo, Dëne Sųłıné, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, Sm'álgyax, Nisga'a, and Dogrib alphabets, of several proposed Venetian alphabets, and of the ISO 11940 romanization of Thai.² The EKI letter database records the capital Ł for Upper Sorbian, Lower Sorbian, Belarusian, Kashubian, and Polish.⁷ Latvian used ł for /ʎ/ before 1921, when it replaced the letter with ļ.³

In Polish the letter appears in place names, personal names, and other words, including Łódź, Jagiełło, Wałęsa, Michał, Paweł, Łukasz, and łączność.⁸

Sound values

Slavic /w/. In Polish, Kashubian, and Upper and Lower Sorbian, ł spells /w/, a voiced labio-velar approximant, the sound English writes as W.²^•³^•⁸ Standard modern Polish pronounces Michał as /ˈmi.xaw/.³ The letter is a historical fossil: ława 'bench' goes back to Proto-Slavic *lavà with an l, but Polish now says /ˈwa.va/, while the later Italian loanword lawa 'lava' keeps plain l.³

An l-like realization persists in some Polish dialects. Anna Kostecka-Sadowa's 2020 study of villages near Lubaczów in south-eastern Poland found a front-tongue dental ł well preserved there, counting it among the traits tying those dialects to the Polish of the old eastern borderlands.³ The PWN language advice service describes the same distribution from the other side: modern ł corresponds to the hard front-dental consonant, while the letter l preserves the old soft palatal ľ, still heard in East Slavic languages and in the speech of some older speakers of Polish dialects (poľe, ľas, ľudzie).⁴

North American /ɬ/. In a run of North American alphabets, including Navajo, Inupiaq, Chipewyan, Kwak'wala, Nootka, Okanagan, and Canadian Tlingit, ł spells the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative /ɬ/, as in Navajo łį́į́ʼ 'horse' (/ɬĩ́ːʔ/).³

History in Polish orthography

The Latin alphabet offered only 21 letters in the Middle Ages, while medieval Polish had at least twice as many sounds, so early Polish writing had to invent devices for the missing consonants.⁴ In Jakub Parkoszowic's orthographic treatise of about 1440, the distinction between hard and soft l was marked by a crossed ľ, as in the pair ľis 'lis' : lis 'łys = łysy'.⁴

Zaborowski's reform. Early in the 16th century Stanisław Zaborowski, in his Ortographia seu modus recte scribendi et legendi Polonicum idioma quam utilissimus, proposed diacritic marks, dots, strokes, hooks, and the ogonek, for Polish sounds; the letters ż and ł were introduced along with strokes for soft consonants such as ś, ź, ń, and dź, and this spelling remains in force today.⁵ His 1513 treatise, issued in ten editions during the 16th century, shows the crossed ł in use, in the example stąpił do ṗekłow, and his proposed form of the letter was widely adopted.⁴

Adoption was not automatic. Polish orthographers took up diacritics cautiously, following the reformed Czech spelling, because hats and strokes over letters were associated in Catholic Poland with Jan Hus, burned at the stake in 1415.⁴ One competing proposal failed outright: Łukasz Górnicki recommended writing the ł sound with the double sign ll, in spellings such as chwałła and milly, which did not catch on; instead, from the beginning of the 16th century the single letter ł came into use.⁶ Printing helped consolidate the system: Gutenberg's invention of movable-type printing in 1440 spurred normalization and wider diffusion of Polish spelling rules, and in the Renaissance Hieronim Wietor's printing house helped consolidate Polish orthographic usage.⁵

An early-modern grammatical source describes the letter's value in exactly the terms its form suggests: plain L is common to other languages, but when crossed at the top as Ł or ł it has a pronunciation proper to the Polish language, requiring the tongue to touch the upper teeth, as in lata, łata, łaska.⁹

Typography, encoding, and related characters

The letter's two graphic forms are conventionalized by medium: in handwriting the stroke is a crossbar at the top of the l, while in print it is a diagonal stroke through the middle.⁶

In Unicode, U+0142 is named LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH STROKE, belongs to the Latin script, has General_Category Lowercase_Letter, and has been encoded since Unicode 1.1; its Unicode_1_Name was LATIN SMALL LETTER L SLASH.¹ Its Decomposition_Type is None, meaning it is a single atomic letter rather than l plus a combining stroke, and its uppercase and titlecase mapping is U+0141.¹ It is not Bidi_Mirrored, not Emoji, and has the Line_Break value Alphabetic; the Unicode confusables data lists it as confusable with the sequence l + ̸, the plain letter followed by a combining slash.¹

Before Unicode, the letter was carried by national and regional legacy charsets: the EKI database records U+0141 (old name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L SLASH, Adobe glyph name Lslash) in CP775 (0xAD), CP1250 (0xA3), CENTEURO (0xFC), ISO 8859-2 (0xA3), CP852 (0x9D), ISO 8859-13 (0xD9), CP1257 (0xD9), and ISO 8859-16 (0xA3).⁷

Insight: one letter, two sound worlds

Ł is one glyph with two independent careers. In Slavic writing it was created as a mark for the hard, non-palatal l, the continuation of the Proto-Slavic dark L, and in Polish, Kashubian, and Sorbian that sound then evolved further into /w/, leaving the letter spelling a sound it was never drawn for.²^•⁸ In North America, orthographers designing alphabets for languages such as Navajo and Inupiaq reached for the same crossed-l shape, but for a different target entirely, the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative /ɬ/.³ The two uses are parallel adoptions of a convenient glyph, not a single history: a reader meeting Łódź and łį́į́ʼ is seeing the same letterform doing unrelated jobs.⁸^•³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Writing and notation systems › Latin script

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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