Lamedh or lamed is the twelfth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Hebrew lÃÂmeḠ, Aramaic lÃÂmaḠð¡Â, Syriac lÃÂmaḠà, Arabic lÃÂm , and Phoenician lÃÂmd ð¤Â. Its sound value is . It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian ðªÂâÂÂâÂÂâÂÂ, South Arabian , and Ge'ez .
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Lambda (ÃÂ), Latin L, and Cyrillic El (ÃÂ).
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-.
The letter is named ÃÂçà.
Its form depends on its position in the word:
has functions as a grammatical particle when used as a prefix:
(, ) is essentially a preposition meaning 'to' or 'for', as in ', 'for my father'. In this usage, it has become concatenated with other words to form new constructions often treated as independent words: for instance, ', meaning 'why?', is derived from and ', meaning 'what?' thus getting 'for what?'. A semantically equivalent construction is found in most Romance languages, e.g. French , Spanish , and Italian (though is an archaism and not in current use).
The other construction, ( ) is used as an emphatic particle in very formal Arabic and in certain fixed constructions, such as (itself an emphatic particle for past-tense verbs) and in the conditional structure , effectively one of the forms of 'if...then...'.
Hebrew spelling: <big></big>
Lamed transcribes as an alveolar lateral approximant .
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 ', learner). It is also used as the Electoral symbol for the Yisrael Beiteinu party.
As a prefix, it can have two purposes:
Variants: