El

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The twelfth letter of the English alphabet, written as L ; an informal American term for a raised railway running on steel supports above the streets
2. The alphabetic character representing the lateral consonant sound ; a colloquial name in the United States for a train line carried on an elevated track
3. The letter L in the alphabet ; slang for a railway that runs on a raised structure above ground level, especially in a city

Etymology: The letter L takes its name from the Latin "el," which the Romans borrowed from the Greek letter lambda. Its modern English name has a more unusual pathway: in the Latin alphabet's letter-names, "el" sat within a set of single-syllable forms that English speakers pronounce with a vowel before the consonant, a pattern that also gave "em," "en," and "ess." The name's shape is a reminder that letter names were once spelled out by sound rather than by written form. The railway sense has a different and more recent origin. In American English, "L" became shorthand for "elevated," the term used for railways built on raised tracks above the streets, and the word came to stand for such lines in its own right. The name of New York's raised railways, the "El," shows this clearly, and the usage spread from there to other cities with similar systems.

Synonyms: elevated railway, elevated