ר, the Hebrew cursive letter resh

History

ר is the 20th letter of the Hebrew alphabet and has a numerical value of 200. In traditional and modern Hebrew and Yiddish, it represents the voiced uvular fricative /ʁ/ or alveolar trill /r/.

Cursive resh is written as a single smooth, rounded arch curving downward to the baseline, lacking any sharp right angle or upper corner serif.

In handwritten Yiddish and Hebrew, resh is one of the most common letters, often abbreviated with an apostrophe (geresh) as an honorific prefix ("Reb" or "Rabbi").

Resh is usually taken to mean head, as in Proto-Semitic raʾš.^[1] The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek rho, the Latin R and the Cyrillic Р.^[2] Modern Hebrew most often pronounces it as a voiced uvular fricative; Ashkenazim sometimes use a uvular or an alveolar trill,^[3] and Sephardim and Mizrahim an alveolar trill or flap.^[4] Resh does not normally take a dagesh, yet the most widely accepted version of the Hebrew Bible marks it with one 17 times,^[5] and in the Yemenite tradition it can take one as most other consonants do.^[6]