Lamedh
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| Phonemic representation | l, ɫ | |||||||||
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| Position in alphabet | 12 | |||||||||
| Numerical value | 30 | |||||||||
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Lamed or Lamedh 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 Л.
The letter is named lām, 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):
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?". This construction is virtually semantically identical the equivalent in most Romance languages, e.g. French pourquoi, Spanish por qué, and Italian perché (though ché is an archaism and not in current use).
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