Zayin (also spelled zain or ****zayn or simply zay) is the seventh letter of the Semitic abjads, including Arabic zāy, Aramaic zain 𐡆, Hebrew zayīn , Phoenician ****zayn 𐤆, and Syriac ****zayn ܙ. It represents the sound. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek zeta (Ζ), Etruscan z, Latin Z, and Cyrillic Ze З, as well as Ж.

Origin

The Proto-Sinaitic glyph may have been called ziqq, may not have been based on a hieroglyph, and may have depicted a "fetter". An alternative view is that it is based on the "copper ingot" hieroglyph (𓈔) in the form of an axeblade, after noting that the name "zayin" has roots in Aramaic to refer to "Arms," "Armor," and "Metal used for arms." The Phoenician letter appears to be named after a sword or other weapon. In Hebrew, zayin means "weapon", the verb lĕzayyēn means "to arm", and the verb lĕhizdayyēn means "to arm oneself".

Arabic zāy

The letter is named zāy. It has two forms, depending on its position in the word: The similarity to rāʼ ر is likely a function of the original Syriac forms converging to a single symbol, requiring that one of them be distinguished as a dot; a similar process occurred to jīm and ḥāʼ. The same letter has another name – ژ|že – in a number of languages, such as Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, Urdu and Uyghur (see K̡ona Yezik̡).

Hebrew zayin

In modern Hebrew, the frequency of the usage of zayin, out of all the letters, is 0.88%. Hebrew spelling: זַיִן In modern Hebrew, the combination (zayin followed by a geresh) is used in loanwords and foreign names to denote as in vion.

Significance

Numerical value (gematria)

In gematria, zayin represents the number 7|seven, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years it means 7000 (i.e. זתשנד in numbers would be the future date 7754).

Use in Torah scroll

Zayin, in addition to ʻayin, gimel, teth, nun, shin, and tzadi, is one of the seven letters which receive a special crown (called a tagin) when written in a Sefer Torah (Torah scroll).

Syriac zain

Zain is a consonant with the sound which is a voiced alveolar fricative.

Character encodings