Lamedh or Lamed is the twelfth letter of the

Semitic abjads An abjad (, ar, أبجد; also abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with other alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowel ...

, including

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

Lāmed ,

Aramaic The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic ( syc, ܐܪܡܝܐ, Arāmāyā; oar, 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; arc, 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; tmr, אֲרָמִית), are a language family containing many varieties (languages and dialects) that originated in ...

Lāmadh

Syriac Syriac may refer to: * Syriac language, an ancient dialect of Middle Aramaic *Sureth, one of the modern dialects of Syriac spoken in the Nineveh Plains region * Syriac alphabet ** Syriac (Unicode block) ** Syriac Supplement * Neo-Aramaic languages ...

Lāmaḏ ܠ,

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...

, and Phoenician Lāmed Phoenician_lamedh

. Its sound value is . The Phoenician letter gave rise to the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

Lambda Lambda (}, ''lám(b)da'') is the 11th letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiced alveolar lateral approximant . In the system of Greek numerals, lambda has a value of 30. Lambda is derived from the Phoenician Lamed . Lambda gave ris ...

(Λ),

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

L, and

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking cou ...

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 crook A shepherd's crook is a long and sturdy stick with a hook at one end, often with the point flared outwards, used by a shepherd to manage and sometimes catch sheep. In addition, the crook may aid in defending against attack by predators. Whe ...

, i.e. a pastoral staff.

Hebrew Lamed

Hebrew spelling:

Pronunciation

Lamed transcribes as an

alveolar lateral approximant The voiced alveolar lateral approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral approximants is , and the e ...

Significance

Lamed in

gematria Gematria (; he, גמטריא or gimatria , plural or , ''gimatriot'') is the practice of assigning a numerical value to a name, word or phrase according to an alphanumerical cipher. A single word can yield several values depending on the cipher ...

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 Yisrael Beiteinu ( he, יִשְׂרָאֵל בֵּיתֵנוּ, russian: Наш Дом Израиль, lit. ''Israel Our Home'') is a secularist, nationalist right-wing political party in Israel. The party's base was originally secular Rus ...

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

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

Modern Standard Arabic Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Modern Written Arabic (MWA), terms used mostly by linguists, is the variety of standardized, literary Arabic that developed in the Arab world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; occasionally, it also re ...

. (Normally, diacritics are not written): is used as a prefix in two different ways. (, ) is essentially a

preposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...

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 The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...

, 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...'.

Character encodings

External links

{{Northwest Semitic abjad Phoenician alphabet Arabic letters Hebrew letters