Spelling the Hebrew Alphabet

The Hebrew Alphabet

Many word games allow you to spell the individual letters of the Hebrew alphabet, making it a handy word list to study. Sometimes, though, I just like to look at it...

listen to it

Here are a few quick facts about this alphabet before we turn our attention to the individual letters...

The number of letters in the alphabet, and the traditional spelling of each letter, varies from source to source (as you can see by the differences between the video and my own descriptions!). The authority used to settle both issues on this page is The Chambers Dictionary. Why? Because that's my favorite dictionary, and it's my website ;-)

Unlike the Greek and Latin alphabets, which have upper and lower case versions of each letter, the Hebrew alphabet has only one case. Five of the letters do, however, have variant forms, called SOFIT*, when appearing at the end of a word. These letters are KAPH, MEM, NUN, PEH, and SADHE. This is one of the reasons people disagree on the number of letters in the alphabet.

Because Hebrew is written from right to left, this alphabet will not normally appear in the Anglicized order in which I have presented it on this page.

Traditional Hebrew does not make use of vowels. In more modern times, however, diacritical symbols called NIQQUD* have been introduced to indicate the presence of vowel sounds. Of course, I only mention this fact here in the hope that the Scrabble dictionary folk will notice the word NIQQUD* and add it to their lexicon.

A DREIDEL (also DREIDL) is a kind of spinning top used in a Jewish gambling game. A dreidel has four sides, each face having one of the following Hebrew letters imprinted: NUN, GIMEL, HEH, and SIN.

So let's take a look at the individual letters, and see how they might help out the word-gamer now and then. As always, I use an asterisk (*) to let you know that a word is not allowed in Scrabble.

ALEPH