Zayin (also spelled zain or zayn or simply zay) is the seventh letter of the
Semitic abjads, including
Phoenician Zayin
,
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
Zayin ,
Yiddish Zoyen ,
Aramaic
The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic ( syc, ܐܪܡܝܐ, Arāmāyā; oar, 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; arc, 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; tmr, אֲרָמִית), are a language family containing many varieties (languages and dialects) that originated i ...
Zain
,
Syriac Zayn ܙ, and
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walte ...
Zayn or Zāy . It represents the sound .
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
zeta (Ζ),
Etruscan ''z''
,
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power ...
Z, and
Cyrillic Ze З.
Meaning
The
Proto-Sinaitic glyph
A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...
may have been called , based on a
hieroglyph depicting a "
manacle".
The Phoenician letter appears to be named after a sword or other weapon. In
Mishnaic Hebrew, ' () means "sword", and the verb ' () means "to arm". In
Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew ( he, עברית חדשה, ''ʿivrít ḥadašá ', , '' lit.'' "Modern Hebrew" or "New Hebrew"), also known as Israeli Hebrew or Israeli, and generally referred to by speakers simply as Hebrew ( ), is the standard form of the He ...
slang
Slang is vocabulary (words, phrases, and usage (language), linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in spoken conversation but avoided in formal writing. It also sometimes refers to the language generally exclusive to the members of p ...
, ' () means "
penis
A penis (plural ''penises'' or ''penes'' () is the primary sexual organ that male animals use to inseminate females (or hermaphrodites) during copulation. Such organs occur in many animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate, but males d ...
" and ' () is a vulgar term which generally means to perform
sexual intercourse,
although the older meaning survives in ' ("armed struggle") (), ' ("armed forces") (), and ' () ("armed, i.e., reinforced
concrete
Concrete is a composite material composed of fine and coarse aggregate bonded together with a fluid cement (cement paste) that hardens (cures) over time. Concrete is the second-most-used substance in the world after water, and is the most ...
").
Arabic zāy
The letter is named . It has two forms, depending on its position in the word:
The similarity to '
is likely a function of the original Syriac forms converging to a single symbol, requiring that one of them be distinguished as a dot; a similar process occurred to
and
.
The same letter has another name – ''
že'' () – in a number of languages, such as
Persian,
Pashto
Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani ().
Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official languag ...
,
Kurdish,
and
Uyghur (see
K̡ona Yezik̡).
Hebrew zayin
In modern Hebrew, the frequency of the usage of zayin, out of all the letters, is 0.88%.
Hebrew spelling:
In modern Hebrew, the combination (zayin followed by a
geresh) is used in loanwords and foreign names to denote as in ''vion''.
Significance
Numerical value (gematria)
In
gematria, zayin represents the number
seven,
and when used at the beginning of
Hebrew years it means 7000 (i.e. in
numbers would be the future
date 7754).
Use in Torah scroll
Zayin, in addition to
ʻayin,
gimel,
teth,
nun,
shin, and
tzadi, is one of the seven letters which receive a special crown (called a ''
tagin'') when written in a
Sefer Torah (Torah scroll).
Meaning as a noun
For the Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew meaning of 'zayin' as a noun, see
above.
It is one of several Hebrew letters that have an additional meaning as a noun. The others are:
bet the 2nd letter whose name is a grammatical form of the word for 'house' ();
vav the 6th letter whose name means 'hook' ();
kaf the 11th whose name means 'palm
f the hand or 'tablespoon' ();
ʻayin
the 16th whose name means 'eye' ();
pe
the 17th whose name means 'mouth' ();
qof the 19th whose name means 'monkey' or "eye of needle" ();
tav the 22nd whose name means 'mark' (),
and several other Hebrew letters, whose names are ancient Hebrew forms of nouns still used, with a slight change of form or pronunciation, as nouns in modern Hebrew.
Syriac zain
Zain is a consonant with the sound which is a
voiced alveolar fricative
The voiced alveolar fricatives are consonantal sounds. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents these sounds depends on whether a sibilant or non-sibilant fricative is being described.
* The symbol for the alveolar sibilant ...
.
Character encodings
See also
*
ڤ - Ve
*
پ - Pe
*
گ - Gāf
*
چ - Che
References
{{Northwest Semitic abjad
Phoenician alphabet
Arabic letters
Hebrew letters