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Hebrew Alphabet

The letters and characters of Hebrew written in the Hebrew script, in order — every standard character with its name and codepoint, the additional and punctuation sets, and exactly how many fonts include them. About 9,402,620 people read or write it across 1 country.

Standard characters

The minimal set of characters required for Hebrew — the language's alphabet, in its traditional order. Tap a character to copy it; each name opens the full character page.

How the Hebrew alphabet works

Hebrew is written from right to left and has 22 letters, with no capital forms. Five letters — Kaf, Mem, Nun, Pe and Tsadi — change shape at the end of a word. These final forms (sofit) appear in the chart next to their ordinary forms and have exactly the same sounds. The alphabet itself writes consonants only. The vowel marks (niqqud) in the additional set above are dots and dashes placed around the letters, and in everyday Israeli writing they are usually left out, so the reader supplies the vowels from knowledge of the word.

Three letters carry two sounds each, told apart by a dot — the dagesh — in the middle of the letter: בּ is b and ב is v, כּ is k and כ is the guttural kh, פּ is p and פ is f. The letter ש does double duty as well: a dot at its upper right makes it sh, a dot at its upper left makes it s. The guttural kh sound, as in Bach, is written two ways — with ח, and with the undotted or final form of Kaf.

Two letters, Alef (א) and Ayin (ע), are effectively silent in modern speech: they mark where a vowel begins rather than adding a consonant of their own. Four letters — א, ה, ו and י — double as vowel letters in modern spelling: ו can stand for o or u, י for i, and a ה at the end of a word often stands for a or e. Resh (ר) is the odd consonant out: it is made at the very back of the throat, closer to the French r than to the English one.

Additional Characters

Used for foreign words, names and technical terms, and older forms of the language.

Punctuation characters

The marks used to separate sentences and to clarify meaning.

Where Hebrew is read

Countries shaded by the share of their population that reads or writes Hebrew in the Hebrew script. The map is zoomed to the region where at least 1% of a country's people read it; neighbouring countries are shown unshaded for context.