40 Fun Facts About Hebrew Alphabet

Which Hebrew letter, written ש, inspired the hand shape of Leonard Nimoy's Vulcan salute in Star Trek?

Shin has three upward strokes, the shape Jewish priests make with their hands during a blessing. Nimoy peeked at the gesture in synagogue as a boy and later adapted it for Spock.

On a Hanukkah dreidel, which Hebrew letter, written ג, lets the spinner take everything in the pot?

Gimel stands for a word meaning 'whole', so the spinner scoops the entire pot. The other three sides mean take half, do nothing, or put a piece in.

Like Arabic, the Hebrew alphabet is written and read in which direction?

Right to left is how every line of Hebrew runs. The script also has no capital letters, so names and sentence openings look like any other word.

Which Hebrew letter, written א, did mathematician Georg Cantor borrow to name the sizes of infinite sets?

Aleph numbers rank infinities by size, beginning with aleph-null for the counting numbers. The letter's own name comes from an old Semitic word for 'ox'.

The four Hebrew letters on a Hanukkah dreidel are said to stand for which phrase?

A great miracle happened there is the usual reading of the letters, pointing to the Hanukkah oil story. Dreidels made in Israel swap one letter so the phrase ends 'here'.

Which number, the value of the Hebrew letters spelling chai ('life'), is a favorite multiple for Jewish gifts?

18 is what the two letters of chai add up to, 8 plus 10, so a gift of 18, 36 or 54 dollars doubles as a wish for long life.

Which seafaring people's 22-letter alphabet is the ancestor of both the Hebrew and the Greek alphabets?

Phoenicians traded across the Mediterranean and their consonant-only script travelled with them. The Greeks then added vowels, something the original never wrote down.

Which tiny Hebrew letter, written י, lies behind the English word 'jot' by way of the Greek iota?

Yod's name travelled through Greek and Latin into English. The Gospel of Matthew's 'one jot or one tittle' made it proverbial for the smallest detail.

Which Hebrew word did Gileadite guards in the Book of Judges use as a password to expose fleeing Ephraimites?

Shibboleth caught the Ephraimites because their dialect turned its opening 'sh' into 's'. English kept the word for any telltale custom or phrase that marks out a group.

Which language, built largely on medieval German, is traditionally written in Hebrew letters?

Yiddish borrows the alphabet but, unlike Hebrew, writes out nearly all of its vowels, pressing spare consonant letters into service to do the job.

Which Hebrew letter, written ב, opens the Torah as the first letter of Bereshit, 'in the beginning'?

Bet is closed on three sides and open on one. An old midrash reads that shape as a hint to explore what came after creation, not what came before it.

Which Hebrew letter, written ד, has a name tied to the word for 'door' and a Greek cousin called delta?

Dalet sounds much like delet, the modern Hebrew word for 'door'. The same ancient letter also grew into the Latin D.

Which Hebrew letter, written ח, makes the throaty first sound of challah that English speakers soften to 'h'?

Chet is a rasp made at the back of the throat, a sound most English speakers find hard to produce. The same ancient letter grew into the Greek eta and the Latin H.

Which Hebrew letter, written ל, appears on a car sign in Israel to show that the driver is a learner?

Lamed stands for lomed, 'learner', on the sign. The letter itself is usually traced back to a drawing of an ox-goad, a herdsman's cattle prod.

Which Hebrew letter, named after water, changes from מ to a closed, boxy ם at the end of a word?

Mem echoes mayim, the Hebrew word for water. Its shape is believed to go back to the Egyptian hieroglyph for water as well.

Which Hebrew letter, written ו, is joined to the front of a word to mean 'and'?

Vav means 'hook', a fitting name for the letter that hooks words and clauses together. Grammar books call this use the vav of connection.

Which Bible chapter, the longest of all, has 22 eight-verse sections, one for each Hebrew letter?

Psalm 119 is an acrostic: all eight verses in a section begin with the same letter, working through the alphabet in order. Its 176 verses also make it the longest of the psalms.

Which Hebrew term names the dots and dashes that show vowels, mainly in poetry and children's books?

Niqqud literally means 'dotting' or 'pointing'. Most everyday Israeli writing leaves it out, so fluent readers work out the vowels from context.

Which manuscripts, found in caves near Qumran, include a copy of Leviticus in old Paleo-Hebrew letters?

Dead Sea Scrolls are mostly in the square script, but a few Torah texts keep the older letters, which stayed in use for sacred writing down to the 1st century BCE.

Which Hebrew letter, written ת, is the twenty-second and last letter of the alphabet?

Tav takes its name from a word meaning 'mark' or 'sign'. In the Book of Ezekiel that same word is the mark set on the foreheads of those to be spared.

Which Hebrew letter, written ע, has a name meaning 'eye' and is usually silent in Israeli speech?

Ayin began as a circle or oval drawn to look like an eye. That round shape later became the vowel O in the Greek and Latin alphabets.

Which Hebrew letter, written פ, shares its name with the Hebrew word for 'mouth' and can sound like p or f?

Pe is thought to have started as a drawing of a mouth. With a dot in its centre it is a crisp p, and without the dot it usually softens to f.

Which Hebrew letter, written צ, makes a 'ts' sound and is nicknamed after the word for a righteous person?

Tsadi is often called tzadik, a nickname that probably arose when people rattled off the alphabet and ran its name into the next letter's. Its modern sound is the one that ends the English word 'cats'.

Which Hebrew letter, written ק, has a name that doubles as the Hebrew word for 'monkey'?

Qof once prompted the suggestion that its shape shows a monkey and its tail. Most Hebrew speakers now pronounce it as a plain k.

Which Hebrew letter, written ר, has a name linked to rosh, the word for 'head' heard in Rosh Hashanah?

Resh was handed on to Greek as rho and to Latin as R, which is why all three letters stand for much the same sound.

Which Hebrew letter, written ז, has a name meaning 'weapon' and a Greek descendant called zeta?

Zayin appears to have been named after a sword, and a related Hebrew verb means 'to arm'. It is also the ancestor of the Latin letter Z.

Which Greek letter descends from the same ancient letter as the Hebrew kaf, whose name means 'palm'?

Kappa and the Latin K both grew out of that letter, which is thought to have started life as a drawing of the palm of a hand.

Which Hebrew term describes the special shape that five letters take when they come at the end of a word?

Sofit simply means 'final' or 'ending', and the five shapes are used nowhere else in a word. The older Paleo-Hebrew script had no such forms.

Which Hebrew practice treats each letter as a number so that a word or name can be read as a total?

Gematria takes its name from a Greek word, and the Greeks had a matching practice of their own called isopsephy.

Which medieval French rabbi lends his name to the semi-cursive Hebrew typeface used for printing commentaries?

Rashi never used the script himself: he died several hundred years before it came into use. Early printers set his commentaries in it, and the name stuck.

Which Hebrew letter, written נ, straightens into a long vertical stroke, ן, at the end of a word?

Nun in that final form once served medieval rabbinic writers as shorthand for 'son of'. Four other letters also change shape when they close a word.

Without the dot in its centre, the Hebrew letter kaf, written כ, softens from 'k' to which sound?

Ch as in Bach is the softened sound, and the letter is then called khaf. Put the dot back and it returns to a hard k.

Which linguists' term describes a script such as Hebrew's whose basic letters stand only for consonants?

Abjad was introduced as a term in 1990 by the linguist Peter T. Daniels, who took it from the first four letters of the Arabic alphabet in their old order.

Which Hebrew term names the dot placed inside a letter that hardens its sound, for example from v to b?

Dagesh changes the sound of only three letters in modern Hebrew, although scribes of older Hebrew could place it in almost any letter to show a doubled consonant.

The square Hebrew script was adapted after the Babylonian exile from the alphabet of which language?

Aramaic writing flourished across the Persian Empire, and Jews gradually dropped their older letters for it. Jewish sages called the new style 'Assyrian' script.

In Hebrew numerals, 15 is written as 9 plus 6 rather than 10 plus 5 to avoid spelling what?

A name of God would appear if 15 were written with the letters for 10 and 5, so writers switched to 9 and 6. The number 16 gets the same treatment, as 9 plus 7.

Which Jewish scribe-scholars of Tiberias devised the vowel signs still used in Hebrew Bibles?

Masoretes worked from about the 5th to the 10th century and also devised the chanting marks that guide the public reading of scripture.

Which Hebrew cipher, used in Jeremiah to disguise Babylon as 'Sheshach', swaps the first letter for the last?

Atbash is named for the very letters it pairs: the first with the last, then the second with the next-to-last. The same mirror trick works in any alphabet.

Which small community still uses a script descended from the old Paleo-Hebrew letters?

Samaritans kept the old letter shapes when Jews adopted the square script, holding to them as proof that they were the true heirs of ancient Israel.

Which name is given to the tiny three-stroke flourishes on seven Hebrew letters in a Torah scroll?

Crowns, called tagin, feature in a famous Talmud story in which God ties them to the letters at Mount Sinai and Rabbi Akiva later draws laws from every stroke.