Zayin

	Email		Print
	Bookmark		Link

Zayin

Zayin (also spelled Zain or Zayn or simply Zay) is the seventh letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Aramaic

Aramaic language

Aramaic is a Semitic languages with a 3,000-year history. It has been the language of administration of empires and the language of divine worship....
, Hebrew

Hebrew language

Hebrew is a Semitic languages of the Afro-Asiatic languages. Modern Hebrew is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel and Classical Hebrew is used for prayer or study in Jews communities around the world....
, Syriac

Syriac alphabet

The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from around the 2nd century BC. It is one of the Semitic languages abjads directly descending from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet and shares similarities with the Phoenician alphabet, Aramaic alphabet, and Hebrew alphabet alphabets....
and Arabic alphabet

Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet is the writing system used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic language, Persian language, and Urdu language....
[]. It represents a voiced alveolar fricative

Voiced alveolar fricative

The voiced alveolar fricatives are consonantal sounds. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents these sounds depends on whether a sibilant or non-sibilant fricative is being described....
, IPA

International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic....
.

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
Zeta

Zeta (letter)

Zeta is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 7. It was derived from the Phoenician alphabet Zayin ....
, Etruscan z , Latin

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
Z

Z is the twenty-sixth and final Letter of the modern English alphabet....
, and Cyrillic

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic alphabet is a family of alphabets, subsets of which are used by five Slavic languages national languages as well as non-Slavic . It is also used by many other languages of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Siberia and other languages in the past....
Ze

Ze (Cyrillic)

Discussion

Ask a question about 'Zayin'

Start a new discussion about 'Zayin'

Answer questions from other users

Full Discussion Forum

Encyclopedia

Zayin (also spelled Zain or Zayn or simply Zay) is the seventh letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Aramaic

Aramaic language

Aramaic is a Semitic languages with a 3,000-year history. It has been the language of administration of empires and the language of divine worship....
, Hebrew

Hebrew language

Syriac alphabet

Arabic alphabet

Voiced alveolar fricative

International Phonetic Alphabet

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
Zeta

Zeta (letter)

Zeta is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 7. It was derived from the Phoenician alphabet Zayin ....
, Etruscan z

, Latin

Latin alphabet

Z is the twenty-sixth and final Letter of the modern English alphabet....
, and Cyrillic

Cyrillic alphabet

Ze (Cyrillic)

Ze is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, representing the consonant . It's easily confusable with the figure 3 . It can also be confused with the Russian letter E , which represents the vowel when it does not follow a soft consonant....
?.

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

Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptian hieroglyphs was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements....
depicting a "manacle".

Hebrew Zayin

Orthographic Orthography The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Orthography is derived from Greek language ????? orth?s and ???fe?? gr?phein .... variants
Various Print Fonts			Cursive Hebrew	Rashi Script Rashi script Rashi script is a semi-Hebrew cursive typeface for the Hebrew alphabet, in which Rashi#Works are printed both in the Talmud and Tanakh . This does not mean that Rashi himself used such a script: the typeface is based on a 15th century Sephardi Jews semi-cursive hand and was called by the Ashkenazic Rishonim - the Hachmei Provence script....
Serif	Sans-serif Sans-serif In typography, a sans-serif or sans serif typeface is one that does not have the small features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. The term comes from the French word sans, meaning "without"....	Monospaced	Cursive Hebrew
?	?	?

An apostrophe can be placed in front of Zayin ('?), making it represent .

Significance

In gematria

Gematria

Gematria or gimatria is a system of assigning number to an alphabet. The word "gematria" is generally held to derive from Greek geometria, "geometry", which was used a translation of gema?riya....
, Zayin represents the number seven, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years

Hebrew calendar

The Hebrew calendar or Jewish calendar is a lunisolar calendar used by Jews, now predominantly for religious purposes. It is used to reckon the Jewish New Year and dates for Jewish holidays, and also to determine appropriate Torah reading of Torah portions, Yahrzeits , and daily Psalm reading, among many ceremonial uses....
, it means 7000 (i.e. ????? in numbers

Arabic numerals

The 'arabic numerals', or 'Hindu numerals' are the ten digits , which?along with Decimal Number System by which a sequence was read as a number?were originally defined by Indian mathematics, later modified and transferred to North African Islamic mathematics and transmitted to Europe in the Middle Ages, whence they spread around the wo...
would be the date

Calendar date

A date in a calendar is a reference to a particular day represented within a calendar system. The calendar date allows the specific day to be identified....
7754).

Zayin is also one of the seven letters which receive a special crown (called a tagin) when written in a Sefer Torah

Sefer Torah

A Sefer Torah is a specially hand-written copy of the Torah or Pentateuch, which is the holiest book within Judaism and venerated by Jews. It must meet extremely strict standards of production....
. See Shin

Shin (letter)

Shin is the twenty-first letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician language, Aramaic language, Hebrew language , and Arabic alphabet ....
, Ayin

Ayin

' or ' is the sixteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician alphabet, Aramaic language, Hebrew language and Arabic alphabet ....
, Teth

Teth

is the ninth letter of many Semitic abjads , including Phoenician alphabet, Aramaic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet 'Tet' , Syriac alphabet and Arabic alphabet ; it is 9th in abjadi order and 16th in modern Arabic order....
, Nun

Nun (letter)

Nun is the fourteenth letter of many Semitic language abjads, including Phoenician language, Aramaic language, Hebrew language and Arabic alphabet ....
, Gimel

Gimel (letter)

Gimel is the third Letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician language, Aramaic language, Hebrew language , Syriac alphabet and Arabic alphabet ....
, and Tzadi.

Syriac Zain

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

Voiced alveolar fricative

Arabic Zayn

The letter is named, variously, zayn, zai, and za, and is written is several ways depending in 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

Gimel (letter)

Gimel is the third Letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician language, Aramaic language, Hebrew language , Syriac alphabet and Arabic alphabet ....
and a'

Heth (letter)

or is the reconstructed name of the eighth letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, continued in descended Semitic alphabets as Phoenician alphabet , Syriac alphabet , Hebrew alphabet chet , Arabic alphabet , and Tifinagh ....
. A variant of Arabic . is ? , used in Persian

Persian language

Kurdish language

The Kurdish language is a term used for the language spoken by Kurdish people. It is mainly concentrated in the parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey....
, Urdu

Urdu

Urdu is a Central_Indo-Aryan_languages#Central_Zone_.28Madhya_or_Hindi.29 Indo-Aryan languages of the Indo-Iranian languages, belonging to the Indo-European languages family of languages....
and Uyghur

Uyghur language

Uyghur is a Turkic language spoken by the Uyghur people in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a Central Asian region administered by People's Republic of China....
(see Kona Yezik).