The ancient water symbol that became the letter M
In short: Long before it was the thirteenth letter of our alphabet, M was a picture of flowing water. Tracing its lineage reveals a journey from Bronze Age Egyptian ideograms through Phoenician and Greek scripts to the modern English keyboard.
The origins of the letter M are rooted in the concept of liquid. It likely began as a 'Proto-imaginative' adoption of an Egyptian water ideogram during the Bronze Age. While the Egyptian sign carried the phonetic value /n/ (from the word 'nt'), the Semitic descendants adopted it for the /m/ sound, likely because the Semitic word for water, *mā(y)-, began with that same sound.
This evolution moved from the Semitic letter Mem to the Greek letter Mu (Μ, μ), eventually forming the basis for the Latin alphabet used in English and many Western European languages today. This lineage is visible across various scripts, including the Coptic letter Me, the Cyrillic Em, and even the Runic letter Mannaz.
Beyond its history, the letter carries diverse functional roles. In typography, the 'em dash' derives its name from being roughly the width of a capital M. In mathematics and science, the character is highly versatile: uppercase M can represent 'mega' (one million) or molarity, while lowercase m serves as the standard abbreviation for metre in the SI system. Interestingly, its meaning can shift based on context; in finance, 'm' or 'M' often denotes 1,000, creating potential ambiguity when compared to the 'mega' usage.
The letter also possesses unique phonetic quirks. In English, it is the only letter that is silent when part of the 'mn' digraph at the start of words, such as in 'mnemonic'. In the Washo language, the distinction between upper and lowercase is even more profound, with the uppercase 'M' representing a voiceless bilabial nasal.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: M
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