:is the leading dimension of the array specified by c. The leading dimension must be greater than zero. If transb is specified as 'N' or 'n', the leading dimension must be greater than or equal to 0 and greater than or equal to the value specified in l.

The elements of a matrix (i.e a 2D array) are stored contiguously in memory. However, they may be stored in either column-major or row-major fashion. The stride represents the distance in memory between elements in adjacent rows (if row-major) or in adjacent columns (if column-major). This means that the stride is usually equal to the number of rows/columns in the matrix.