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
DEC Hebrew DEC Hebrew The DEC Hebrew character set is an 8-bit character set developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to support the Hebrew alphabet. It was derived from DEC's Multinational Character Set (MCS) by removing the existing definitions from code points 192 to 223 and 224 to 250 and replacing code points 251 to 256 by the Hebrew letters. Since MCS is a predecessor of ISO/IEC 8859-1, DEC Hebrew is similar to ISO/IEC 8859-8 and the Windows code page 1255, that is, many characters in the range 160 to 191 are the same, and the Hebrew letters are at 192 to