פ, the Hebrew cursive letter pe

History

פ is the 17th letter of the Hebrew alphabet and has a numerical value of 80. In traditional and modern Hebrew and Yiddish, it represents the voiceless bilabial plosive /p/ with dagesh, or the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/ without dagesh; word-finally, it takes the form ף (fe sofit).

Cursive pe consists of an outer rounded enclosure with an internal curl. The final form (fe sofit, ף) extends into a long curved tail descending well below the baseline.

In handwritten letters and ledger entries, pe is common in names, places, and loanwords, and final fe is a prominent marker of word boundaries.

Pe is usually taken to come from a pictogram of a mouth, pe in Hebrew.^[1] A rare variant, the Pe Kefulah or doubled pe, is a small pe written inside a larger one,^[2] and it appears in Torah scrolls, most often Yemenite ones.^[3] Native Hebrew words cannot end in /p/, so loanwords that do end in it keep the ordinary form, as in Philip.^[4] The final form's value of 800 is rarely used; tav written twice, 400 + 400, stands in.^[5]