Zayin (letter)

Zayin (also spelled zain or zayn or simply zay) is the seventh letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Zayin , Hebrew Zayin , Yiddish Zoyen , Aramaic Zain , Syriac Zayn ܙ, and Arabic Zayn or Zāy . It represents the sound .

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek zeta (Ζ), Etruscan ''z'' , Latin Z, and Cyrillic Ze З.

Meaning

The Proto-Sinaitic glyph 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 slang, ' () means " penis" 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").

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, Kurdish, Urdu 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.

Character encodings

See also

* ڤ - Ve
* پ - Pe
* گ - Gāf
* چ - Che

References

{{Northwest Semitic abjad
Phoenician alphabet
Arabic letters
Hebrew letters