What 𝚕 means
No. It is the same lowercase Latin l in a mathematical style. The fixed-width l can distinguish a mathematical variable from plain or differently styled letters.
The historical push came in a 1999 proposal linked to STIX (Scientific and Technical Information Exchange), a collaboration of scientific and technical publishers. Some mathematical letterforms already had separate character identities; the project requested a broader set, including Latin monospace letters, because changing a letter's style can change a formula's meaning. The aim was to preserve those distinctions in plain text.
Can mathematical monospace l look like 1?
Yes. Equal-width characters can still look alike.
Unicode's mathematical typography guidance warns that some monospaced fonts draw lowercase l and digit 1 alike; such a face is unsuitable for math. Read the surrounding expression or choose a font that gives them distinct shapes.
Technical: the equal-width style carries meaning inside mathematical notation.
Do not use it just to style ordinary prose; Unicode reserves this family for mathematical or technical notation.
Don't confuse it with
2Questions people ask
1Can text cleanup turn 𝚕 into an ordinary l?
Yes. NFKC, a Unicode compatibility-normalization form, maps mathematical letters to their plain base letters, so the encoded style can disappear.
How to type 𝚕
𝚕\1D695Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.