Hebrew alphabet written from right to left. It has 22 letters, five of which use different forms at the end of a word. In the traditional form, vowels are indicated by the weak consonants Aleph (), He (), Vav (), or Yodh () serving as vowel letters, or "matres lectionis": the letter is combined with a previous vowel and becomes silent, or by imitation of such cases in the spelling of other forms. Also, a system of vowel points to indicate vowels (diacritics), called niqqud, was developed. In modern forms of the alphabet, as in the case of Yiddish and to some
Paleo-Hebrew alphabet began to fall out of use by the Jews in the 5th century BCE, when the Aramaic alphabet was adopted as the predominant writing system for Hebrew. The present Jewish "square-script" Hebrew alphabet evolved from the Aramaic alphabet. The Samaritans, now fewer than 1,000 people, have continued to use a derivative of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, known as the Samaritan alphabet. While the use of the script is negligible nowadays, it is present in some symbolic usage, such as the ₪1 coin and the logo of the Israeli town Nahariyah. The chart below compares the letters of the Phoenician script with