L

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L, or l, is the twelfth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is el (pronounced /ˈɛl/ EL), plural els.^[1]

Lamedh may have come from a pictogram of an ox goad or cattle prod. Some have suggested a shepherd's staff.^[2]

In most sans-serif typefaces, the lowercase letter ell ⟨l⟩, written l, may be difficult to distinguish from the uppercase letter "eye" ⟨I⟩; in some serif typefaces, the glyph l may be confused with the glyph 1, the digit one. To avoid such confusion, some newer computer fonts (such as Trebuchet MS) have a finial, a curve to the right at the bottom of the lowercase letter ell.

Another means of reducing such confusion is to use symbol ℓ, which is a cursive, handwriting-style lowercase form of the letter "ell"; this form is seen in European road signs and advertisements. In Japan, for example, this is the symbol for the liter. (The International Committee for Weights and Measures recommends using L or l for the liter,^[3] without specifying a typeface.) In Unicode, the cursive form is encoded as U+2113 ℓ SCRIPT SMALL L from the "letter-like symbols" block. Unicode encodes an explicit symbol as U+1D4C1𝓁MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT SMALL L.^[4] The TeX syntax <math>\ell</math> renders it as . In mathematical formulas, an italic form (ℓ) of the script ℓ is the norm. ${\displaystyle \ell }$

Sometimes seen in Web typography, a serif font for the lowercase letter ell, such as l, in otherwise sans-serif text was used.

In the blackletter type used in England until the seventeenth century,^[5][a] the letter L is rendered as .${\displaystyle {\mathfrak {L}}}$

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