Lamedh or lamed is the twelfth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Hebrew lāmeḏ, Aramaic lāmaḏ, Syriac lāmaḏ ܠ, Arabic lām, and Phoenician lāmd . Its sound value is pronounced as /link/.
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Lambda (Λ), Latin L, and Cyrillic El (Л).
The letter is usually considered to have originated from the representation of an ox-goad, i.e. a cattle prod, or a shepherd's crook, i.e. a pastoral staff. In Proto-Semitic a goad was called *lamed-.[1] [2]
The letter is named Arabic: lām.
Its form depends on its position in the word:
Arabic: Lām has functions as a grammatical particle when used as a prefix:
Arabic: Lām-kasra (Arabic: لـِ, pronounced as //li//) is essentially a preposition meaning 'to' or 'for', as in Arabic: لِوالدي , 'for my father'. In this usage, it has become concatenated with other words to form new constructions often treated as independent words: for instance, Arabic: لِماذا , meaning 'why?', is derived from Arabic: لـِ Arabic: li and Arabic: ماذا , meaning 'what?' thus getting 'for what?'. A semantically equivalent construction is found in most Romance languages, e.g. French French: pourquoi, Spanish Spanish; Castilian: por qué, and Italian Italian: perché (though Italian: ché is an archaism and not in current use).
The other construction, (Arabic: لَـ pronounced as //la//) is used as an emphatic particle in very formal Arabic and in certain fixed constructions, such as Arabic: لَقد Arabic: laqad (itself an emphatic particle for past-tense verbs) and in the conditional structure Arabic: لو...لَـ Arabic: law...la, effectively one of the forms of 'if...then...'.
Hebrew spelling: Hebrew: לָמֶד
Lamed transcribes as an alveolar lateral approximant pronounced as /link/.
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 Hebrew: lomed, learner). It is also used as the Electoral symbol for the Yisrael Beiteinu party.
As a prefix, it can have two purposes:
Variants: