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
Hebrew alphabet Israeli Hebrew, initial and final ע (in regular transliteration), silent or initial א, and silent ה are "not" transliterated. To the eye of readers orientating themselves on Latin (or similar) alphabets, these letters might seem to be transliterated as vowel letters; however, these are in fact transliterations of the vowel diacritics – niqqud (or are representations of the spoken vowels). E.g., in אִם ("if", ), אֵם ("mother", ) and אֹם ("nut", ), the letter א always represents the same consonant: (glottal stop), whereas the vowels /i/, /e/ and /o/ respectively represent the spoken vowel, whether it is orthographically denoted by