Semitic Mem is most likely derived from a " Proto-Sinaitic" ( Bronze Age) adoption of the "water" ideogram in Egyptian writing. In typography, an em dash is a punctuation symbol whose width is equal to that of a capital letter M. Figure Two: "Representative selection of proto-Sinaitic characters with comparison to Egyptian hieroglyphs", (p. The letter ⟨m⟩ represents the bilabial nasal consonant sound [ m] in the orthography of Latin as well as in that of many modern languages, and also in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Figure Three: "Chart of all early proto-Canaanite letters with comparison to proto-Sinaitic signs" (p.

M, or m, is the thirteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Figure Four: "Representative selection of later proto-Canaanite letters with comparison to early proto-Canaanite and proto-Sinaitic signs" (p.Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings. In English, the Oxford English Dictionary (first edition) says that ⟨m⟩ is sometimes a vowel, in words like spasm and in the suffix -ism. Learner's Dictionary: M Learner's Dictionary: -'m Collins English Dictionary: m¹ Collins English Dictionary: m² Collins English Dictionary: M Collins English Dictionary: m.

See also: Goldwasser (2010), following Albright (1966), "Schematic Table of Proto-Sinaitic Characters" ( fig. M" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "em," op. In Washo, lower-case ⟨m⟩ represents a typical em sound, while upper-case ⟨M⟩ represents a voiceless em sound. Collins English Dictionary: m- Collins English Dictionary: M'- Collins English Dictionary: 'm American English Dictionary (1): M¹ American English Dictionary (1): M² American English Dictionary (1): m¹ American English Dictionary (1): m² American English Dictionary (1): M'- American English Dictionary (1): m- American English Dictionary (1): -'m American English Dictionary (2): m¹ American English Dictionary (2): m² American English Dictionary (2): M¹ American English Dictionary (2): M² American English Dictionary (2): M American English Dictionary (2): m. 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)-.