Lamedh or Lamed is the twelfth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Hebrew Lāmed , Aramaic Lāmadh , Syriac Lāmaḏ ܠ, Arabic , and Phoenician Lāmed . Its sound value is . 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 crook, i.e. a pastoral staff. Hebrew Lamed Hebrew spelling: Pronunciation Lamed transcribes as an alveolar lateral approximant . 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 , 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 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 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...'. Character encodings External links Phoenician alphabet Arabic letters Hebrew letters