M

M (lowercase m) is the thirteenth letter of the English alphabet and a consonant representing the sound /m/, a bilabial nasal.^{1 • 2} It descends through the Greek letter mu from the Semitic letter mem, and it also serves as the Roman numeral for 1,000.^{1 • 3}

History of the letter

M was the thirteenth letter of the Phoenician and Greek alphabets and the twelfth of the Latin alphabet, which lacked a distinct J in the classical period.^{4 • 8} The Phoenician name of the symbol was mem, and the Greek name μῦ was formed on the analogy of the name for the letter n.⁴ The English letter name M was borrowed from Latin around 1200 AD.¹

Early letterforms. In the earliest representations, written from right to left, the greater length of the first limb of m is characteristic. In early Greek alphabets, a four-stroke M with legs of equal length represented the sound s, not m, while five-stroke forms were confined practically to Crete, Melos, and Cumae; from the last of these the Romans received the letter along with the rest of their alphabet.⁴ The Phoenician mem looked much like the modern two-bumped lowercase m with an added tail, and the Etruscans and then the Romans adopted the Greek form without substantial changes to its shape or proportions.⁹

Abbreviation and numeral uses. Writing the five-stroke form from left to right is thought to have produced the Latin abbreviation M' for the praenomen Manius, with the apostrophe standing for the letter's original fifth stroke.⁴ The Romans pressed M, together with I, X, V, L, C, and D, into service as numerals, giving M the value 1,000.⁹ One account of the numeral's shape holds that 1,000 was at first represented by the Greek letter phi, which in lettering and architectural inscriptions became CI and then M.⁵

Medieval shorthand. During the medieval period, scribes often marked the letter before with a stroke rather than writing out an m, most likely because m was among the slower letters to form.⁹

Sound and pronunciation

The letter represents the nasal consonant /m/ in English and in the Latin alphabet generally. In classical Latin pronunciation, a word-final m was not fully pronounced but merely indicated a nasal pronunciation of the preceding vowel, as in French an, en, on.¹⁰ In French, when m follows a, e, i, o, u, or y, it often forms a nasal vowel with that letter and is itself silent, as in champ, faim, and ombre; it is pronounced in certain words of Latin or foreign origin such as album and Stockholm.¹¹

Encoding in Unicode

In the Unicode Standard, capital M is U+004D LATIN CAPITAL LETTER M, encoded in the Basic Latin block (also known as ASCII) with decimal value 77 and UTF-8 byte 0x4D; its lowercase counterpart m is U+006D.⁶ The character is classified as an uppercase letter, is case-mapped to m, and has the script property Latin.⁶

Several letterlike and mathematical variants exist as separate characters. U+2133 SCRIPT CAPITAL M (ℳ) was deliberately unified with the pre-1949 symbol for the German currency unit Mark, a choice that restricts the range of glyphs usable for the character in the code charts.⁷ The Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block adds styled forms such as U+1D4DC MATHEMATICAL BOLD SCRIPT CAPITAL M and U+1D5E0 MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD CAPITAL M, each carrying a compatibility decomposition to the base letter M.¹² Diacritic combinations are encoded separately, for example U+1E3E LATIN CAPITAL LETTER M WITH ACUTE and U+1E42 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER M WITH DOT BELOW, the latter used in Indic transliteration.¹³

Other uses

Beyond its alphabetic and numeral roles, M appears in specialized notations. In music, "m." refers to a single measure and "mm." to a number of bars.¹⁴ In Cyrillic usage, M is the universally recognized glyph, and the letter appears in the Cyrillic alphabet as М.¹⁵

References

1. M - Etymology, Origin & Meaning, Etymonline
2. M Definition & Meaning, Dictionary.com
3. M in the Phoenician alphabet (textbook excerpt)
4. 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/M, Wikisource
5. Etherington & Roberts Dictionary: Roman numerals
6. U+004D "M" Latin Capital Letter M Unicode Character
7. Chapter 22, The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0.0
8. M, Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary, Scaife ATLAS
9. The Letter M, Fonts.com
10. In classical Latin pronunciation, the letter m, Royal Holloway
11. m, Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, 8e édition
12. Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols, Unicode 18.0.0 names list
13. Latin Extended Additional, Unicode 18.0.0 names list
14. Abbreviations, SUNY Potsdam
15. The Unicode Standard, Version 6.2 (CiteSeerX copy)

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

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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