Lamat in Yucatec is Q'anil in K'iche', a word built on the root for yellow and for ripeness, and it is one of the day names most often connected with maize seed in highland practice. The Classic glyph is generally read as a star sign, and Lamat is widely associated with Venus, the planet whose 584-day cycle the Dresden Codex tabulates against the 260-day count in one of the most sophisticated pieces of astronomy surviving from the pre-Columbian Americas.
The central Mexican eighth sign is Tochtli, rabbit, and the Maya lists also gloss Lamat as rabbit, so the two agree even though the star reading is the one that dominates in the inscriptions. The rabbit is the animal Mesoamerican tradition sees in the face of the Moon, and both associations, the lunar rabbit and the Venus star, belong to the sign at once.
Lamat opens a trecena once in each 260-day round and is not among the four Year Bearers of either system, the Classic Ik, Manik, Eb and Kaban or the Postclassic Yucatec Kan, Muluc, Ix and Kawak.
The Venus association gives the eighth sign a place in the most technical Maya astronomy that survives. The Dresden Codex sets out a Venus table running the planet's 584-day synodic cycle against the 260-day count and correcting the accumulated error at intervals, and the day names in that table are part of the apparatus rather than decoration. Lamat sits inside a working piece of mathematics.