ז, the Hebrew cursive letter zayin

History

ז is the 7th letter of the Hebrew alphabet and has a numerical value of 7. In traditional and modern Hebrew and Yiddish, it represents the voiced alveolar sibilant /z/.

Cursive zayin consists of a short horizontal top curve connected to an angled, slightly slanted descender, differing from the crowned vertical t-shape of printed typography.

In historical documents, zayin appears in calendar dates (representing the numeral seven), transactional records, and Yiddish terms derived from Slavic or Germanic sources.

The Phoenician letter appears to be named after a sword or other weapon,^[1] and in Hebrew zayin means weapon, while the verb lĕzayyēn means to arm.^[2] The Proto-Sinaitic sign before it may have been called ziqq and may have shown a fetter.^[3] The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek zeta, Latin Z and Cyrillic З, and also to Ж.^[4] Followed by a geresh, ז׳ writes [ʒ], the s of vision, in loanwords and foreign names.^[5] At the start of a Hebrew year zayin means 7000, so a date that begins with it lies in the future.^[6] In a Torah scroll zayin is one of the seven letters that receive a special crown, called a tagin.^[7]