() is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two 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 al ...

(the others being , , , , ). In

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

it represents the

voiceless dental fricative The voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English speakers as the 'th' in ''think''. Though rather rare as a phoneme in the world's inventory of languages, it is en ...

, also found in English as the " th" in words such as "thank" and "thin". In Persian,

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
'' Kurdish it is pronounced as s as in "sister" in English. In name and shape, it is a variant of (). Its numerical value is 500 (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 ...

). The Arabic letter is named ''ṯāʾ''. It is written is several ways depending in its position in the word: In contemporary spoken Arabic, pronunciation of ṯāʾ as is found in the Arabian Peninsula, Iraqi, and Tunisian and other dialects and in highly educated pronunciations of Modern Standard and Classical Arabic. Pronunciation of the letter varies between and within the various

varieties of Arabic The varieties (or dialects or vernacular languages) of Arabic, a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family originating in the Arabian Peninsula, are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. There are considerable vari ...

: while it is consistently pronounced as the

voiceless dental plosive The voiceless alveolar, dental and postalveolar plosives (or stops) are types of consonantal sounds used in almost all spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postal ...

Maghrebi Arabic Maghrebi Arabic (, Western Arabic; as opposed to Eastern or Mashriqi Arabic) is a vernacular Arabic dialect continuum spoken in the Maghreb region, in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Western Sahara, and Mauritania. It includes Moroccan, Al ...

(except Tunisian and eastern Libyan), on the other hand in the Arabic varieties of the

Mashriq The Mashriq ( ar, ٱلْمَشْرِق), sometimes spelled Mashreq or Mashrek, is a term used by Arabs to refer to the eastern part of the Arab world, located in Western Asia and eastern North Africa. Poetically the "Place of Sunrise", th ...

(in the broad sense, including Egyptian, Sudanese and Levantine) and

Hejazi Arabic Hejazi Arabic or Hijazi Arabic (HA) ( ar, حجازي, ḥijāzī), also known as West Arabian Arabic, is a variety of Arabic spoken in the Hejaz region in Saudi Arabia. Strictly speaking, there are two main groups of dialects spoken in the Hejaz ...

, it can be pronounced as either or as the

sibilant Sibilants are fricative consonants of higher amplitude and pitch, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English words ''sip'', ''zip'', ''ship'', and ...

voiceless alveolar fricative The voiceless alveolar fricatives are a type of fricative consonant pronounced with the tip or blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge (gum line) just behind the teeth. This refers to a class of sounds, not a single sound. There are at lea ...

. Depending on the word in question, words pronounced as are generally more technical or "sophisticated." Regardless of these regional differences, the pattern of the speaker's variety of Arabic frequently intrudes into otherwise Modern Standard speech; this is widely accepted, and is the norm when speaking the

mesolect A post-creole continuum (or simply creole continuum) is a dialect continuum of varieties of a creole language between those most and least similar to the superstrate language (that is, a closely related language whose speakers assert or asserte ...

known alternately as ''lugha wusṭā'' ("middling/compromise language") or ''ʿAmmiyyat/Dārijat al-Muṯaqqafīn'' ("Educated/Cultured Colloquial") used in the informal speech of educated Arabs of different countries. When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ת׳.

Common Semitic perspective

The choice of the letter ' as the base for this letter was not due to etymology (see

History of the Arabic alphabet It is thought that the Arabic alphabet is a derivative of the Nabataean variation of the Aramaic alphabet, which descended from the Phoenician alphabet, which among others also gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet and the Greek alphabet, the latter ...

), but rather due to phonetic similarity. For other Semitic cognates of the phoneme ' see Sound changes between Proto-Semitic and the daughter languages. The

South Arabian alphabet The Ancient South Arabian script (Old South Arabian 𐩣𐩯𐩬𐩵 ''ms3nd''; modern ar, الْمُسْنَد ''musnad'') branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the late 2nd millennium BCE. It was used for writing the Old Sou ...

retained a symbol for ' (𐩻).

Common Semitic perspective

Character encodings

See also