Lamedh

← Kaph Lamedh Mem →
Phoenician
Hebrew	ל‎
Aramaic
Syriac	ܠ
Arabic	ل
Phonemic representation	l, ɫ
Position in alphabet	12
Numerical value	30
Alphabetic derivatives of the Phoenician
Greek	Λ
Latin	L
Cyrillic	Л

Lamedh or Lamed is the twelfth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Hebrew 'Lāmed ל, Aramaic Lāmadh , Syriac Lāmaḏ ܠ, Arabic Lām ل, and Phoenician Lāmed . Its sound value is [l].

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Lambda (Λ), Latin L, and Cyrillic El (Л).

Origin[]

The letter is usually considered to have originated from the representation of a goad, i.e. a cattle prod, or a shepherd's stick, i.e. a pastoral staff.

Hebrew Lamed[]

Orthographic variants
Various print fonts			Cursive Hebrew	Rashi script
Serif	Sans-serif	Monospaced
ל	ל	ל

Hebrew spelling: לָמֶד

Pronunciation[]

Lamed transcribes as an alveolar lateral approximant /l/.

Significance[]

Lamed in gematria represents the number 30.

With the letter Vav it refers to the Lamedvavniks, the 36 righteous people who save the world from destruction.

As an abbreviation, it can stand for litre. Also, a sign on a car with a Lamed on it means that the driver is a student of driving (the Lamed stands for lomed, learner). It is also used as the Electoral symbol for the Yisrael Beiteinu party.

As a prefix, it can have two purposes:

• It can be attached to verb roots, designating the infinitive (Daber means "speak", Ledaber means to speak).
• It can also act as a preposition meaning "to" or "for".

Arabic lām[]

The letter is named lām, and is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:

Some examples on its uses in Modern Standard Arabic. (Normally, diacritics are not written):

Lām is used as a prefix in two different ways. Lām-kasra (لـِ, /li/) is essentially a preposition meaning 'to' or 'for', as in لِوالدي liwālidī, 'for my father'. In this usage, it has become concatenated with other words to form new constructions often treated as independent words: for instance, لِماذا limāḏā, meaning 'why?', is derived from لـِ li and ماذا māḏā, meaning 'what?' thus getting 'for what?'. A semantically equivalent construction is found in most Romance languages, e.g. French pourquoi, Spanish por qué, and Italian perché (though ché is an archaism and not in current use).

The other construction, lām-fatḥa (لَـ /la/) is used as an emphatic particle in very formal Arabic and in certain fixed constructions, such as لَقد laqad (itself an emphatic particle for past-tense verbs) and in the conditional structure لو...لَـ law...la, effectively one of the forms of 'if...then...'.

Character encodings[]