In normal typefaces, the letter has a stroke approximately in the middle of the vertical stem, passing it at an angle between 70° and 45°, never perpendicularly. In cursive handwriting and typefaces that imitate it, the capital letter has a horizontal stroke through the middle and looks almost exactly the same as the pound sign. In the cursive lowercase letter, the stroke is also horizontal and placed on top of the letter instead of going through the middle of the stem, which would not be distinguishable from the letter t. The stroke is either straight or slightly wavy, depending on the style. Unlike, the letter is usually written without a noticeable loop at the top. Most publicly available multilingual cursive typefaces, including commercial ones, feature an incorrect glyph for. A rare variant of the ł glyph is a cursive double-ł ligature, used in words such as Władysław II Jagiełło, Radziwiłł family or Ałłach, where the strokes at the top of the letters are joined into a single stroke.
Polish
In Polish, is used to distinguish historical dark L from clear L. The Polish now sounds the same as the English, as in water. In 1440, proposed a letter resembling to represent clear L. For dark L he suggested "l" with a stroke running in the opposite direction to the modern version. The latter was introduced in 1514–1515 by Stanisław Zaborowski in his Orthographia seu modus recte scribendi et legendi Polonicum idioma quam utilissimus. L with stroke originally represented a velarized alveolar lateral approximant, a pronunciation that is preserved in the eastern part of Poland and among the Polish minority in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. This pronunciation is similar to Russian unpalatalised in native words and grammar forms. In modern Polish, Ł is normally pronounced . This pronunciation first appeared among Polish lower classes in the 16th century. It was considered an uncultured accent by the upper classes until the mid-20th century when this distinction gradually began to fade. The shift from to in Polish has affected all instances of dark L, even word-initially or intervocalically, e.g. ładny is pronounced, słowo is, and ciało is. Ł often alternates with clear L, such as the plural forms of adjectives and verbs in the past tense that are associated with masculine personal nouns, e.g. mały → mali. Alternation is also common in declension of nouns, e.g. from nominative to locative, tło → na tle. Polish final Ł also often corresponds to Ukrainian word-final Ve and Belarusian . Thus, "he gave" is "dał" in Polish, "дав" in Ukrainian, "даў" in Belarusian, but "дал" in Russian. The old pronunciation of Ł is still fully understandable but is considered theatrical in most regions.
In contexts where Ł is not readily available as a glyph, basic L is used instead. Thus, the surname Małecki would be spelled Malecki in a foreign country. Similarly, the stroke is sometimes omitted on the internet, as may happen with all diacritic-enhanced letters. Leaving out the diacritic does not impede communication for native speakers, but it may be confusing for those learning Polish. In the 1980s, when some computers available in Poland lacked Polish diacritics, it was common practice to use a pound sterling sign for Ł. This practice ceased as soon as DOS-based and Mac computers came with a code page for such characters.
The Unicode codepoints for the letter are U+0142 for the lower case, and U+0141 for the capital. In the LaTeXtypesetting system and may be typeset with the commands \L and \l, respectively. The HTML-codes are Ł and ł for and, respectively.
