| Hebrew alphabet |
|---|
| א ב ג ד ה ו |
| ז ח ט י כך |
| ל מם נן ס ע פף |
| צץ ק ר ש ת |
| History · Transliteration Niqqud · Dagesh · Gematria Cantillation · Numeration |
‘Áyin or Ayin is the sixteenth letter in many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Omicron (Ο), and hence the Latin O, and the equivalent in the Cyrillic alphabet.
‘Áyin, like all Phoenician letters, was a consonant, represented in transliteration by the ‘ at the beginning of the word ‘Áyin. However, the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic letters that are historically derived from `Ayin all represent vowels.
In Hebrew, the letter ‘Áyin has a numeric value of 70. It traditionally represents a pharyngeal sound that has no equivalent in the English language (namely IPA [ʕ]), and its name translates as "eye".
In some historical Sephardi pronunciations, `Ayin was pronounced as a velar nasal "ng" consonant sound, while in non-"Mizrahi" modern Israeli Hebrew it is pronounced as a glottal stop consonant sound in certain cases, but is mostly silent (i.e. it is given the same treatment as Aleph). However, certain changes in adjoining vowels often testify to the former presence of `Ayin, even if `Ayin itself is no longer pronounced.
In Yiddish, the 'ayin is pronounced /e/.
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