or or Xe (, transliterated as (

DIN-31635 DIN 31635 is a Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) standard for the transliteration of the Arabic alphabet adopted in 1982. It is based on the rules of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (DMG) as modified by the International Orientalis ...

), ( Hans Wehr), ( ALA-LC) or ( ISO 233)), 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 al ...

(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 standardized, literary Arabic that developed in the Arab world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; occasionally, it also re ...

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