Laam

Laam, or lam, is a letter of the Arabic alphabet. It represents the voiced alveolar lateral approximant [l], the same consonant sound found in the English letter L. The name al-lām is traditional, and the letter’s form and usage have roots in the Phoenician lamed, part of the Semitic writing lineage.

In Arabic script, lam has four contextual forms: isolated ل, initial لـ, medial ـلـ, and final ـل. It is a dual-joining letter, which means it can connect to both the preceding and following letters within a word, facilitating fluid cursive writing. Lam commonly appears in ligatures, the most notable being lam-alif, written as لا, a digraph that represents the syllable or word-initial sound "la" in many texts. The ligature is widely used in standard Arabic typography and calligraphy.

Beyond Arabic, lam is used in other languages that adopt the Arabic script, including Persian (Farsi), Urdu, Kurdish, and others. In these languages, its pronunciation remains [l], though adjacent vowels and diacritics may differ, and the letter often participates in additional ligatures and calligraphic styles.

Computing and encoding details include the Unicode code point U+0644 for the Arabic letter lam. In most digital fonts, lam’s joining behavior and ligature formation are managed by the text layout engine, preserving its distinctive shapes in various scripts and languages.