ע, the Hebrew cursive letter ayin

History

ע is the 16th letter of the Hebrew alphabet and has a numerical value of 70. In traditional and modern Hebrew and Yiddish, it represents a glottal stop /ʔ/ or silent letter in Ashkenazi and modern Hebrew, historically the voiced pharyngeal fricative /ʕ/; in Yiddish, it serves as the standard vowel letter for /e/.

Cursive ayin is rendered with a flowing rounded gesture, dropping down into an open curve before sweeping rightwards, unlike the rigid y-shaped angular branches of the printed letter.

Because Yiddish uses ayin as its primary representation for the vowel /e/, cursive ayin occurs on almost every line of Yiddish epistolary handwriting.

Ayin comes from the Proto-Sinaitic letter for eye, and the Phoenician letter was a circle or oval, clearly an eye;^[1] it gave rise to the Greek O.^[2] In some historical Sephardi and Ashkenazi pronunciations ayin was a velar nasal, the ng of sing,^[3] and remnants survive in Yiddish, as in Yankev for Jacob.^[4] Ayin is one of the seven letters which receive special crowns in a Torah scroll.^[5]