Semitic Mem is most likely derived from a " Proto-Sinaitic" ( Bronze Age) adoption of the "water" ideogram in Egyptian writing. Figure Three: "Chart of all early proto-Canaanite letters with comparison to proto-Sinaitic signs" (p.

In English, the Oxford English Dictionary (first edition) says that ⟨m⟩ is sometimes a vowel, in words like spasm and in the suffix -ism. 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.

Figure Two: "Representative selection of proto-Sinaitic characters with comparison to Egyptian hieroglyphs", (p.Learner's Dictionary: M Learner's Dictionary: -'m Collins English Dictionary: m¹ Collins English Dictionary: m² Collins English Dictionary: M Collins English Dictionary: m. Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.