The letter L in braille

How to recognise it

Dots 1, 2 and 3 make a full vertical line down the left column — the longest straight line in the code and unmistakable under the finger.

The family this letter belongs to

Braille is built from ten base shapes, and L is part of the family that starts with b. Add dot 3 to that shape and you get the second letter; add dots 3 and 6 and you get the third. Learning the family together is far faster than learning L on its own, because one shape gives you three letters. The complete braille alphabet puts the ten families in order.

Where L turns up in Grade 2

Standing on its own with spaces either side, L is not a letter at all — it is the whole word “like”. Inside a longer word it goes back to being an ordinary l. That is the rule beginners trip on most: like is a single cell, but the l in a word like “like” is just a letter.

Writing a capital L

Braille has no separate capital letters. A capital is the same cell with a marker in front of it: dot 6, sitting alone in its own cell. So capital L is two cells, not one.

Write that marker twice and it capitalises the entire word that follows, which is how braille handles something written in block capitals. A word in full capitals therefore costs two extra cells, however long it is.

Easily confused with

These letters differ from L by a single dot, which is where reading errors actually happen. Drill them against each other rather than in alphabetical order.

Practice words

Each word below starts with L, written in Grade 1 so every letter has its own cell.