or or Xe (, transliterated as ( DIN-31635), (

Hans Wehr Hans Bodo Gerhardt Wehr (; 5 July 1909, Leipzig24 May 1981, Münster) was a German Arabist. A professor at the University of Münster from 1957–1974, he published the ''Arabisches Wörterbuch'' (1952), which was later published in an Engl ...

), (

ALA-LC ALA-LC (American Library AssociationLibrary of Congress) is a set of standards for romanization, the representation of text in other writing systems using the Latin script. Applications The system is used to represent bibliographic information by ...

) or (

ISO 233 The international standard ISO 233 establishes a system for romanization of Arabic and Syriac. It was supplemented by ISO 233-2 in 1993. 1984 edition The table below shows the consonants for the Arabic language. ISO 233-2:1993 ISO 233-2: ...

)), is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the

Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet (more specifically, an abjad) known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization. The Phoenician alpha ...

(the others being , , , , ). It is based on the ' . It represents the sound or in

Modern Standard Arabic Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Modern Written Arabic (MWA), terms used mostly by linguists, is the variety of Standard language, standardized, Literary language, literary Arabic that developed in the Arab world in the late 19th and early 20th ...

. The pronunciation of is very similar to German, Irish, and Polish unpalatalised " ch", Russian х (Cyrillic Kha), and

Peninsular Spanish Peninsular Spanish ( es, español peninsular) (also known as the Spanish of Spain ( es, español de España, links=no), European Spanish ( es, español europeo, links=no), Iberian Spanish ( es, español ibérico, links=no) or Spanish Spanish ( es ...

" j". In name and shape, it is a variant of .

South Semitic South Semitic is a putative branch of the Semitic languages, which form a branch of the larger Afro-Asiatic language family, found in (North and East) Africa and Western Asia. History The "homeland" of the South Semitic languages is widely d ...

also kept the phoneme separate, and it appears as South Arabian , Ge'ez ኀ. Its numerical value is 600 (see

Abjad numerals The Abjad numerals, also called Hisab al-Jummal ( ar, حِسَاب ٱلْجُمَّل, ), are a decimal alphabetic numeral system/alphanumeric code, in which the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet are assigned numerical values. They have been us ...

). When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ח׳. The most common transliteration in English is "kh", e.g. Khartoum ( ''al-Kharṭūm''), Sheikh (). ' is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:

Character encodings

See also