L


L is the twelfth letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is el, plural els.

History

Lamedh may have come from a pictogram of an ox goad or cattle prod. Some have suggested a shepherd's staff.

Use in writing systems

Phonetic and phonemic transcription

In phonetic and phonemic transcription, the International Phonetic Alphabet uses to represent the lateral alveolar approximant.

English

In English orthography, usually represents the phoneme, which can have several sound values, depending on the speaker's accent, and whether it occurs before or after a vowel. The alveolar lateral approximant occurs before a vowel, as in lip or blend, while the velarized alveolar lateral approximant occurs in bell and milk. This velarization does not occur in many European languages that use ; it is also a factor making the pronunciation of difficult for users of languages that lack or have different values for it, such as Japanese or some southern dialects of Chinese. A medical condition or speech impediment restricting the pronunciation of is known as lambdacism.
In English orthography, is often silent in such words as walk or could, and it is usually silent in such words as palm and psalm; however, there is some regional variation.

Other languages

usually represents the sound or some other lateral consonant.
Common digraphs include, which has a value identical to in English, but has the separate value voiceless alveolar lateral fricative in Welsh, where it can appear in an initial position. In Spanish, represents , , , , or , depending on dialect.
A palatal lateral approximant or palatal occurs in many languages, and is represented by in Italian, in Spanish and Catalan, in Portuguese, and in Latvian.
In Washo, lower-case represents a typical el sound, while upper-case represents a voiceless el sound, a bit like double in Welsh.

Other uses

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 pound sign, which is based on it.
The Roman numeral L represents the number 50.

Forms and variants

In some sans-serif fonts, the lowercase letter ell may be difficult to distinguish from the uppercase letter eye or the digit one. To avoid such confusion, some newer fonts have a finial, a curve to the right at the bottom of the lowercase letter ell.
Another means of reducing such confusion, increasingly common on European road signs and in advertisements, uses a cursive, handwriting-style lowercase letter ell. A special letter-like symbol is sometimes used for this purpose in mathematics and elsewhere. In Unicode, this symbol is with HTML numeric character reference ℓ. In Japan, for example, this is the symbol for the liter. However, the International System of Units recommends using Unicode symbols or for the liter.
Another solution, sometimes seen in Web typography, uses a serif font for the lowercase letter ell, such as, in otherwise sans-serif text.

Related characters

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

Other representations