Zayin

← Waw               Zayin               Heth →
Phoenician	Hebrew	Aramaic	Syriac	Arabic
	ז		ܙ	ﺯ
Phonemic representation:				z
Position in alphabet:				7
Numerical (Gematria/Abjad) value:				7

Zayin (also spelled Zain or Zayn) is the seventh letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew ז, Syriac ܙ and Arabic alphabet zāī ﺯ. It represents a voiced alveolar fricative, IPA /z/.

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

The Proto-Canaanite glyph appears to be named after a sword or other weapon. (In Hebrew, "Zayin" means sword, and the verb "Lezayen" means to arm). The Proto-Sinaitic glyph according to Brian Colless may have been called ziqq, based on a hieroglyph depicting a "manacle".

Hebrew Zayin

Orthographic variants
Various Print Fonts			Cursive Hebrew	Rashi Script
Serif	Sans-serif	Monospaced
ז	ז	ז

An apostrophe can be placed in front of Zayin (\'ז), making it represent /ʒ/.

Significance

In gematria, Zayin represents the number seven, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years, it means 7000 (i.e. זתשנד in numbers would be the date 7754).

Zayin is also one of the seven letters which receive a special crown (called a tagin) when written in a Sefer Torah. See Shin, Ayin, Teth, Nun, Gimel, and Tzadi.

Syriac Zain

Zain is a consant with the "z" sound which is a voiced alveolar fricative.

Arabic Zayn

The letter is named zaynʼ, and is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:

The similarity to ر 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 ǧim and ḥa\'.

Zāī

A variant of Arabic ﺯ. is ژ /ʒ/, used in e.g. the Uyghur language (see K̡ona Yezik̡).

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