Beretta's alphabet soup
I’m resurrecting an old thread here, I know, but since it’s one of the first that comes up on Google related to this topic, I thought it might be forgiven.
The “L” and “M” both refer to design characteristics of the 92 series, but they refer to different aspects.
“L” = Long (or, if you want to be really correct and use the original Italian, “
Lungo”) for “long slide travel”. The shorter, lighter slides on the Compact and Centurion models require longer slide travel to function optimally and to avoid battering the frames, so the frames have slightly different internal dimensions, particularly the rail lengths. All 92 series Compacts, including both the double-stack and single-stack, are “L”, though this part of the description is often dropped both in casual usage and on some models markings. Centurions are also technically ”L” too, since their slides are apparently the same except for the name, though they generally aren’t marked as “L”. Confusingly, Beretta did make a very small number of Compact L pistols (possibly only single-stack Type M, but I haven’t been able to confirm this) using Centurion slides, so they are marked as Centurions despite having the shorter grip length of the Compact.
Type M = Type Monofilare (Italian for single-file/single-column). The Compacts with single-stack magazines are thus Type M. This is also how we get the somewhat rare “Centurion Type M”, a single-stack “Centurion” that seems to really be just a Compact L Type M with a Centurion-marked slide. The thinking is that Beretta had the Centurion in current production at the time, while the Type M was officially out of production, so they just used Centurion slides on warehoused Type M frames to fill some contract orders. “So you want the single-stack compact? Sorry, we don’t...uhhh...wait...oh, yeah, sure, we can do that."
Side Note: The entire Compact L Type M field is wildly complicated and non-conformist. For being relatively scarce pistols, they were made in a dizzying range of variations, usually in really small numbers and often uncataloged. This was especially true in the 1990s. Centurion-marked slides, SB type frames with FS type slides, guns dated years after production officially ceased, etc., etc. One theory is that since many (most?) of the later Type Ms were made for different governmental and police agency contracts around the world, small batches of semi-custom configurations became the usual thing.
All of the letter designations that Beretta uses reference the description of some design spec, but they are very confusing in the way they relate them to the pistols. For example (some originally refer to Italian words with similar spellings, but some refer directly to English):
92S is ""
Slide-mounted safety" (as opposed to the original frame-mounted safety)
92SB is "
Slide-mounted safety, firing pin
Block"
92F is "
Federal US test submission"
92FS is "
Federal US test model,
Slide retention device" (the oversized hammer pin that catches the slide if it separates)
92G is "
Gendarmerie Nationale", the French national police who first asked Beretta for a decocker-only model.
92D is "
Double action only"
92DS is "
Double action only, with
Safety"
92CB is "
Competition model, barrel
Bushing"
And that's without getting into the
really weird stuff!
