Lamedh or Lamed is the twelfth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Hebrew Lāmed , Aramaic Lāmadh Lamed

, Syriac Lāmaḏ ܠ, Arabic , and Phoenician Lāmed Phoenician_lamedh

. Its sound value is . The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Lambda (Λ), Latin L, and

Cyrillic , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...

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, i.e. a

pastoral staff A crosier or crozier (also known as a paterissa, pastoral staff, or bishop's staff) is a stylized staff that is a symbol of the governing office of a bishop or abbot and is carried by high-ranking prelates of Roman Catholic, Eastern Catholi ...

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 eq ...

Significance

Lamed in gematria represents the number 30. With the letter Vav it refers to the

Lamedvavnik The Tzadikim Nistarim ( he, צַדִיקִים נִסתָּרים, "hidden righteous ones") or Lamed Vav Tzadikim ( he, ל"ו צַדִיקִים,"36 righteous ones"), often abbreviated to ''Lamed Vav(niks)'', refers to 36 righteous people, a notio ...

s, 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 An electoral symbol is a standardised symbol allocated to an independent candidate or political party by a country's election commission for use in election ballots. Usage Symbols are used by parties in their campaigning, and printed on ballot p ...

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

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. (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, e.g.

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

, 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 Conditional (if then) may refer to: * Causal conditional, if X then Y, where X is a cause of Y * Conditional probability, the probability of an event A given that another event B has occurred *Conditional proof, in logic: a proof that asserts a ...

structure , effectively one of the forms of 'if...then...'.

Character encodings

External links

{{Northwest Semitic abjad Phoenician alphabet Arabic letters Hebrew letters