eelam (, "īḻam", also spelled eezham, ilam or izham in english) is the native tamil name for the south asian island state of sri lanka. eelam is also a name for the spurge (a plant), toddy (an intoxicant) and gold. the exact etymology and the original meaning of the word are not clearly known, and there are number of conflicting theories. the retroflex approximant l in eelam is a characteristic phoneme for dravidian languages, retained in closely related tamil and malayalam. conventionally it has been represented in the latin script with the digraph "zh".