The Hebrew Alphabet: 22 Letters, Final Forms and Niqqud

The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, written from right to left. It is an abjad: the letters are consonants, and the vowels are optional dots and dashes called niqqud, which most everyday Hebrew leaves out. Five letters take a different shape at the end of a word, a handful look confusingly alike, and three change their sound depending on a dot inside them. Learn those four things and you can sound out real Hebrew words.

This guide uses the letters, names and sounds from our free Hebrew alphabet chart, and every practice word comes from our list of the 6,856 most common Hebrew words, with its rank on that list.

#What kind of script is Hebrew?

Hebrew is an abjad: its letters write consonants, and a reader supplies most of the vowels. Four letters do double duty as vowel helpers. Vav (ו) can stand for o or u, yod (י) for i, and alef (א) and ayin (ע) are silent letters that carry a vowel, which is why so many Hebrew words seem to start with one.

It runs right to left, and it has no capital letters. Unlike Arabic, which is also an abjad, printed Hebrew letters stand apart instead of joining, so each letter has one shape, apart from the five final forms. The same alphabet is used for Yiddish and Ladino. Handwritten Hebrew uses a cursive style whose shapes differ quite a lot from print, so learn the printed letters first and the cursive later.

If you know the Arabic alphabet, several letters will feel familiar in name and order: alef and alif, bet and ba, dalet and dal, lamed and lam, mem and mim, nun and nun. Both scripts descend, through Aramaic, from the same ancient Semitic alphabet.

#The 22 Hebrew letters

Here is the whole alphabet in order, with the final form where there is one, and the name and rough English sound from our chart.

Two of these sounds have no English equivalent. Het (ח), and kaf without its dot, sound like the ch in Scottish loch. Resh (ר) is said in the throat, closer to a French r than an English one.

#The five final forms (sofit)

Five letters change shape when they are the last letter of a word. The final form is called sofit, “final”. The sound stays the same, except that final kaf and final pe are always the soft sounds, kh and f.

Four of the five final forms, ך (kaf), ן (nun), ף (pe) and ץ (tsadi), stretch down below the line, where the regular forms sit on it. Final mem (ם) is the odd one out: it stays on the line and closes into a box. When you see a long tail dropping below the line, you are usually at the end of a word.

#Hebrew letters that look alike

Printed Hebrew letters are mostly built from the same square strokes, so some pairs differ by a single corner or a gap. These are the ones to learn side by side.

A few letters also sound alike in modern Hebrew even though they look different: tet (ט) and tav (ת) are both t; qof (ק) and kaf with its dot are both k; het (ח) and kaf without its dot are both kh; samekh (ס) and shin as s are both s; and alef (א) and ayin (ע) are both silent for most speakers. Reading them is easy. Spelling them means learning each word.

#The dagesh: the dot that changes the sound

A dagesh is a dot written inside a letter. On most letters it has no effect on modern pronunciation, but on three it changes the sound:

Here is the catch: most Hebrew text leaves the dagesh out along with the vowels, so you often can’t see which sound it is. A rule of thumb gets you most of the way. At the start of a word, these letters are usually the hard sound (b, k, p); after a vowel, in the middle or at the end of a word, they are usually soft (v, kh, f). So כלב (dog, #635) is kelev: the kaf at the start is k, the bet at the end is v. There are exceptions, such as אבא (father, #104), said aba with a hard b, and those you learn word by word.

Shin has a dot of its own: on the upper right (שׁ) it is sh, on the upper left (שׂ) it is s. Unpointed text leaves that out too.

#Niqqud: the vowel points

Hebrew vowels are written as niqqud, small dots and dashes mostly under the letters. Here they are on mem (מ):

#Why most Hebrew text leaves them out

Newspapers, books for adults, street signs, websites and text messages are written without niqqud. Fluent readers recognize the words, and unpointed spelling adds extra vav and yod letters to hint at the vowels. Niqqud appears in children’s books, poetry, prayer books and the Bible, dictionaries and textbooks for learners, and occasionally on a single word that would otherwise be ambiguous.

Ambiguity is real. The three letters ספר can be read as sefer (book), safar (he counted), siper (he told) or sapar (barber). In a sentence, only one reading makes sense.

#Read your first Hebrew words

Each word below is on our most common words list, with its rank. The letters are listed in reading order, right to left.

Start with כן and טוב, where vav is the o in tov. Then compare אבא and אמא: both start with a silent alef, but one is read a and the other i, and nothing on the page tells you which. That is the abjad at work, and it is why hearing words matters as much as reading them.

#A learning plan for the Hebrew alphabet

The chart is at /tools/alphabet/hebrew. After the letters, move to vocabulary with the most common Hebrew words, each with its English meaning. When you can read a few hundred, the Hebrew vocabulary test samples words from across the list and estimates how many you know.

#Practice reading and writing with native speakers

A chart gives you the letters, but unpointed Hebrew is learned word by word, from people who already know how each word sounds. On LangX, Hebrew is one of the 182 languages you can pick, and matching runs both ways: you see people who speak Hebrew and are learning a language you speak.

9:41

Lucía M. Online

Today

Hold any message to correct it — corrections are the most useful thing you can send.

¿Cómo fue tu fin de semana? Cuéntame en inglés si quieres. How was your weekend? Tell me in English if you like. 09:12

Fui a la playa con mi hermana. Hacía mucho calor y yo no llevé agua. 09:14 · Read

Correction from Lucía Hacía mucho calor y yo no llevé agua. Hacía mucho calor y no llevé agua. The «yo» isn't wrong, it just sounds emphatic — like you specifically forgot. 09:15

Message in Spanish…

Write in Hebrew letters from the start, and your partner can correct your spelling, including the letters that sound alike. Replies are unlimited, and translation is built into the chat (20 a day on the free plan, which includes 5 new conversations a day). LangX has voice and photo messages rather than live calls. To compare it with other apps, see our list of the best language exchange apps. To start, get the app or read how to do a language exchange.

#FAQ

#How many letters are in the Hebrew alphabet?

22. Five of them also have a final form, so there are 27 shapes to learn in print.

#Does Hebrew have vowels?

Yes, but they are written as niqqud, dots and dashes around the letters, and most everyday text leaves them out. The letters vav and yod also stand for some vowels.

#Is Hebrew written right to left?

Yes, words and sentences run right to left. Numbers are written with the largest digit on the left, as in English.

#What is a dagesh in Hebrew?

A dot inside a letter. On bet, kaf and pe it changes the sound: with it they are b, k and p, without it v, kh and f.

#Are the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets related?

Yes. Both are abjads, both run right to left, and they share an ancestor, so several letters have similar names and the same order. The shapes are different, and Arabic letters join while Hebrew letters stand apart. See our Arabic alphabet guide.

More alphabet guides: Arabic and Persian, two more right-to-left abjads; Greek, Georgian and Armenian; the Cyrillic Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian alphabets; Korean; and the abugidas Hindi, Bengali and Malayalam.