Lamadh is the twelfth letter of the Syriac abjad, with the numeral value thirty. It writes l, a voiced alveolar lateral. It joins on both sides and takes the full set of positional shapes.
In every Syriac hand lamadh rises above the line. It is the one letter that regularly breaks the upper edge of a line of writing, as its cognates do in Hebrew and in the other Aramaic scripts, and that height is the single most useful landmark on a page of cursive Syriac. In a hand where most letters sit on the line and run into one another with nothing to mark a word boundary, an ascender is worth a great deal.
Its name is the inherited Northwest Semitic word for an ox-goad, the implement used to drive cattle. As with the other letter names, the noun describes a sign of the older linear alphabet and no longer describes anything in the Syriac form.
Lamadh also writes the Syriac preposition and object marker l, prefixed directly to the word it governs, so a reader meets it at the head of a word constantly and it is joined to whatever follows. The combination is what makes the letter so visible: a very frequent grammatical prefix, written by the one letter that stands taller than its neighbours, at the start of a word.