Lamedh

← Kaph Lamedh Mem →
Phoenician Hebrew ל Aramaic Syriac ܠ Arabic لـ,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 Phoenician Lāmed , Hebrew 'Lāmed ל, Aramaic Lāmadh , Syriac Lāmaḏ ܠ, and Arabic Lām ل. 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:

Position in word:	Isolated	Final	Medial	Initial
Glyph form: (Help)	ل‎	ـل‎	ـلـ‎	لـ‎

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

Character	ל		ل		ܠ		ࠋ
Unicode name	HEBREW LETTER LAMED		ARABIC LETTER LAM		SYRIAC LETTER LAMADH		SAMARITAN LETTER LABAT
Encodings	decimal	hex	decimal	hex	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	1500	U+05DC	1604	U+0644	1824	U+0720	2059	U+080B
UTF-8	215 156	D7 9C	217 132	D9 84	220 160	DC A0	224 160 139	E0 A0 8B
Numeric character reference	ל	ל	ل	ل	ܠ	ܠ	ࠋ	ࠋ

Character	𐎍		𐡋		𐤋
Unicode name	UGARITIC LETTER LAMDA		IMPERIAL ARAMAIC LETTER LAMEDH		PHOENICIAN LETTER LEMDA
Encodings	decimal	hex	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	66445	U+1038D	67659	U+1084B	67851	U+1090B
UTF-8	240 144 142 141	F0 90 8E 8D	240 144 161 139	F0 90 A1 8B	240 144 164 139	F0 90 A4 8B
UTF-16	55296 57229	D800 DF8D	55298 56395	D802 DC4B	55298 56587	D802 DD0B
Numeric character reference	𐎍	𐎍	𐡋	𐡋	𐤋	𐤋