Hebrew alphabet and was known by Jewish sages as the Ashuri alphabet (lit. "Assyrian"), since its origins were alleged to be from Assyria. Various "styles" (in current terms, "fonts") of representation of the Jewish script letters described in this article also exist, including a variety of cursive Hebrew styles. In the remainder of this article, the term "Hebrew alphabet" refers to the square script unless otherwise indicated. The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. It does not have case, but five letters have different forms when used at the end of a word. Hebrew is written from right to left. Originally, the alphabet
Biblical Hebrew phonemes. After a sound shift the letters , could only mark one phoneme, but (except in Samaritan Hebrew) still marked two. The old Babylonian vocalization system wrote a superscript above the to indicate it took the value , while the Masoretes added the shin dot to distinguish between the two varieties of the letter. The original Hebrew alphabet consisted only of consonants, but gradually the letters , , , , also became used to indicate vowels, known as "matres lectionis" when used in this function. It is thought that this was a product of phonetic development: for instance, *bayt ('house')