Zayin


Zayin is the seventh letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Zayin, Hebrew 'Zayin, Yiddish Zoyen, Aramaic Zain, Syriac Zayn ܙ, and Arabic Zayn or Zāy ز. It represents the sound.
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek zeta, Etruscan z, Latin Z, and Cyrillic Ze З.

Original and modern meaning of the noun 'zayin'

In Modern Hebrew slang, zayin means "penis" and lezayen is a vulgar term which generally means to perform sexual intercourse, although the older meaning survives in maavak mezuyan , kokhot mezuyanim , and beton mezuyan .
The Proto-Sinaitic glyph may have been called ziqq, based on a hieroglyph depicting a "manacle".

Arabic zāy

The letter is named zāy. It has two forms, depending on its position in the word:
The similarity to rāʼ Resh#Arabic rāʾ 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 – ze – in a number of languages, such as Persian.

Že

It also has a modified version: ژ, which is used in Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, Urdu and Uyghur.

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 is used in loanwords and foreign names to denote as in vion.

Significance

Numerical value (gematria)

In gematria, zayin represents the number seven, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years it means 7000.

Use in Torah scroll

Zayin is also one of the seven letters which receive a special crown when written in a Sefer Torah, besides ʻayin, gimel, teth, nun, shin, and tzadi.

Meaning as a noun

For the Biblical and Modern Hebrew meaning of 'zayin' as a noun, see above.
It is one of several Hebrew letters that have an additional meaning as a noun. The others are:
bet , whose name is a grammatical form of the word for 'house' ;
vav , whose name means 'hook' ;
kaf , whose name means 'palm ' or 'tablespoon' ;
ʻayin , whose name means 'eye' ;
pe , whose name means 'mouth' ;
qof , whose name means 'monkey' or "eye of needle" ;
tav , whose name means 'mark',
and several other Hebrew letters, whose names are ancient Hebrew forms of nouns still used, with a slight change of form or pronunciation, as nouns in modern Hebrew.

Syriac zain

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

Character encodings