Zayin

Zayin (also spelled zain, zayn, or simply zay) is the seventh letter of the Semitic abjads. These include Phoenician zayn, Hebrew zayīn, Aramaic zain, Syriac zayn, and Arabic zāy. It makes the [z] sound.

The Phoenician letter influenced the Greek zeta, Etruscan z, Latin Z, and Cyrillic Ze. It is also connected to the Ancient North Arabian, South Arabian, and Ge'ez.

Origin

The early form of this letter may have looked like a "fetter." Some think it was based on a picture of a copper piece that looks like an axeblade. The Phoenician letter was probably named after a sword or another weapon. In Hebrew, the word zayin means "weapon." There are verbs that mean "to arm" or "to arm oneself."

Arabic zāy

The letter is named zāy. It can look different depending on its place in a word.

A special version of zāy called že is used in some languages like Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, Urdu and Uyghur. This version has three dots on top instead of one.

Main article: Že

Hebrew zayin

In modern Hebrew, the letter zayin is used less often than other letters. It appears in about 0.88% of all words. When zayin is followed by a special symbol called a geresh, it makes a different sound, like in the word "vision."

Zayin has an important meaning in a special way of counting called gematria, where letters stand for numbers. In gematria, zayin stands for the number seven. When it appears at the start of a Hebrew year, it shows that the year is in the 7000s.

Zayin is one of seven letters that get a special decoration called a tagin when written in a Torah scroll, a very important book for Jewish people.

Orthographic variants
Various print fonts			Cursive Hebrew	Rashi script
Serif	Sans-serif	Monospaced
ז	ז	ז

Syriac zain

Zain is a letter that makes the /z/ sound. This sound is made with the tongue close to the top teeth.

Character encodings

The letter Zayin is found in old writing systems like Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic. In all these languages, it makes the "z" sound. These letters belong to a group of symbols called abjads. Abjads are some of the first ways people learned to write a long time ago.