Am is the thirteenth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes m, a voiced bilabial nasal. It joins on both sides.
Its name follows the alphabet's usual pattern of the sound with a preceding a. The water that stands behind Syriac mim, Hebrew mem and, through the Phoenician sequence, the Greek mu, has no counterpart in the Mandaic name, which describes a pronunciation rather than a thing.
Mandaic is written right to left and joined, as Syriac and Arabic are, so a word is drawn as a connected run broken only where a right-joining letter falls. Am is one of the letters that keeps a run going, and a long Mandaic word can carry a single unbroken stroke across most of its length. The letters that break a run are halqa, az, it, aksa and ash, together with the three signs that close the alphabet; everything else, am included, carries the stroke on.
Am holds the thirteenth place, where m stands in Hebrew, in Syriac and in the older Aramaic sequence. Mandaic has no separate final letters of the kind Hebrew developed; what it has, like Syriac, is positional forms belonging to the letters themselves.
In Hebrew the thirteenth letter has a separate final form counted apart from the twenty-two, and in Hebrew and Syriac it carries the numeral value forty. Mandaic has neither. Its positional forms belong to the letter and are not counted separately, and no numeral use of the Mandaic letters is described in the reference literature.