Note that Pe has a straight left leg, without the hook.

In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was людиѥ (ljudije), meaning "people".

As used in the alphabets of various languages, El represents the following sounds: The /l/ phoneme in Slavic languages has two realizations: hard ([l], [ɫ], or [lˠ], exact pronunciation varies) and soft (pronounced as [lʲ]) – see palatalization for details.

Slavic languages except Serbian and Macedonian use another orthographic convention to distinguish between hard and soft /l/, so ⟨Л⟩ can denote either variant depending on the subsequent letter.

In addition, л was formerly used in Chukchi to represent the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative /ɬ/ but has since been replaced by ԓ. El is sometimes used to represent the Clausen function, and if not, the capital greek letter Lambda is.