Number & MeasureGreek → English
Lambda
/ˈlæmdə/noun
The eleventh letter of the Greek alphabet, used as a symbol for wavelength, decay constant and anonymous functions.
The Greek roots
λάμβδα
lámbda
the letter L
Literally: “the letter lambda”
Follow a root:λάμβδα1 word
The story of the word
The shape arrived from Phoenician lamed, an ox goad, and Greek straightened it into Λ. Spartan shields carried the letter for Λακεδαίμων, which is why film Spartans march behind a big lambda. Alonzo Church chose λ for his 1930s calculus of functions and later gave more than one account of why, including a shrug, so the typographic story about a stray caret is a guess rather than a record.
- How it travelled
- Phoenician → Ancient Greek → Latin → English
In a sentence
Wavelength is written as lambda in every optics textbook.
The whole file was three lambdas and a map call.