Shin (letter)

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Phonemic representation ʃ / s
Position in alphabet 21
Numerical value 300
Alphabetic derivatives of the Phoenician

Shin (also spelled Šin (šīn) or Sheen) literally means "teeth", "press", and "sharp"; It is the twenty-first letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician 𐤔, Aramaic/Hebrew ש, and Arabic ش‎ (in abjadi order, 13th in modern order). Its sound value is a voiceless sibilant, [ʃ] or [s].


The South Arabian and Ethiopian letter Śawt is also cognate.


Egyptian hieroglyph 
Phoenician sin.svg Σ S


The history of the letters expressing sibilants in the various Semitic alphabets is a bit complicated, due to different mergers between Proto-Semitic phonemes. As usually reconstructed, there are five Proto-Semitic phonemes that evolved into various voiceless sibilants in daughter languages, as follows:

Proto-Semitic Akkadian Arabic Canaanite Hebrew Aramaic Ge'ez
š س s Phoenician sin.svg š שׁ š שׁ š s
s s س s Phoenician samekh.svg s ס s ס s s
ص Phoenician sade.svg צ צ
ś ش š š š שׂ s שׂ or ס s ś
ṣ́ ض ṣ צ ע ʿ ṣ́

Hebrew Shin / Sin[edit]

Orthographic variants
Various Print Fonts Cursive
Serif Sans-serif Monospaced
ש ש ש Hebrew letter Shin handwriting.svg Hebrew letter Shin Rashi.png

Hebrew spelling: שִׁין


See also Hebrew phonology, Śawt.

Sin and Shin Dot[edit]

Sin and Shin dot

שׁ שׂ
IPA s, ʃ
Transliteration s, sh
English example sought, shot
Sin Dot
Shin Dot
Other niqqud


Name Symbol IPA Transliteration Example
Sin dot (left) שׂ /s/ s sour
Shin dot (right) שׁ /ʃ/ sh shop

Unicode encoding[edit]

Glyph Unicode Name
ׂ U+05C2 SIN DOT


In gematria, Shin represents the number 300.




In Judaism[edit]






Sayings with Shin[edit]




Arabic šīn/sīn[edit]

In the Arabic alphabet, šīn is at the original (21st) position in Abjadi order. A letter variant sīn takes the place of Samekh at 15th position.

In Modern Standard Arabic, initial sīn-fatḥa (though, normally diacritics are omitted) (سَـ, pronounced /sa-/) is used as a prefix to imperfective verbs to indicate the future tense. Arab grammarians generally consider this prefix to be an abbreviation of سوف sawfa, meaning (in this sense) "will." Thus سَـ sa- prefixed to يكتب yaktub ("he writes") becomes سيكتب sayaktub ("he will write").

sīn represents /s/. It is the 12th letter of the modern alphabet order and is written thus:

Position in word: Isolated Final Medial Initial
Glyph form: س ـس ـسـ سـ


Position in word: Isolated Final Medial Initial
Glyph form: ش ـش ـشـ شـ

The Arabic letter shin was an acronym for "something" meaning the unknown in algebraic equations. In the transcription into Spanish, the Greek letter chi (χ) was used which was later transcribed into Latin x. According to some sources, this is the origin of <x> used for the unknown in the equations.[3][4]

Aramaic Shin/Sin[edit]





Old Aramaic Imperial Aramaic Middle Aramaic Palestinian Aramaic Babylonian Aramaic


Character encodings[edit]

Character ש س ش ܫ
Encodings decimal hex decimal hex decimal hex decimal hex
Character 𐡔 𐤔
Encodings decimal hex decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 2068 U+0814 67668 U+10854 67860 U+10914
UTF-8 224 160 148 E0 A0 94 240 144 161 148 F0 90 A1 94 240 144 164 148 F0 90 A4 94
UTF-16 2068 0814 55298 56404 D802 DC54 55298 56596 D802 DD14
Numeric character reference &#2068; &#x814; &#67668; &#x10854; &#67860; &#x10914;

