Hebrew alphabet
אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי
The Hebrew alphabet — traditionally called the aleph-bet — has twenty-two letters, five of which take a special form at the end of a word. Hebrew writes right-to-left and, like Arabic, is an abjad: vowels are normally unwritten, though optional niqqud dots mark them in religious texts, children's books, and dictionaries.
All 22 letters
History
The Hebrew script used today is technically the "Jewish square script," adopted from Aramaic around the 5th century BCE during the Babylonian exile. The earlier Paleo-Hebrew script — the letters used in the Siloam inscription and First Temple-period ostraca — looks quite different and was eventually retained only for sacred words on coins and in Samaritan tradition. The revival of Hebrew as a spoken language in the late 19th century, led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, made Hebrew the only ancient liturgical language in history to become the daily speech of an entire country again.
Things you might not know
- Five letters have a final form used only at the end of a word: כ→ך, מ→ם, נ→ן, פ→ף, צ→ץ.
- Hebrew letters double as numbers — א = 1, ב = 2, and so on — which is the basis of gematria, the tradition of finding numerical meaning in words.
- Vav (ו) can be a consonant "v", a long vowel "o", or a long vowel "u" depending on context and vowel points.
- The letter shin (ש) is the only letter where a single dot changes its entire sound: שׁ = sh, שׂ = s.