Lamed is the tallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the only one whose stroke rises well above the head-height of its neighbours in ordinary square-script writing, a graphic fact independent of the palaeo-Hebrew-to-square-script transition covered elsewhere in this atlas, since Lamed's height above the line is a feature of the square script itself rather than an inheritance from the older hand. Some early Hebrew letter-mysticism texts describe Lamed's unusual height as a tower rising into the air, connecting the image to the letter's own name and root meaning, to teach or to learn, as though the letter's physical reach upward pictured the reach of study itself.
Because it is the tallest letter, Lamed is also traditionally the first character students learn to identify at a glance in an unfamiliar line of Hebrew text, and its height makes it one of the few letters that cannot easily be confused with any other in the alphabet, a contrast with the frequent look-alike pairs, Beth and Kaph, Dalet and Resh, Vav, Zayin and Nun, that make careful scribal proportion so important elsewhere in Hebrew writing. Lamed is also one of the Sefer Yetzirah's twelve simple letters, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, a classification that has nothing to do with its unusual height and is instead shared with eleven other letters of varied and unremarkable shape.