Ḫāʾ
7th Arabic letter
| Ḫāʾ خَاء | |
|---|---|
| خ | |
| Usage | |
| Writing system | Arabic script |
| Type | Abjad |
| Language of origin | Arabic language |
| Sound values | x, χ |
| Alphabetical position | 7 |
| History | |
| Development | 𐤇
|
| Other | |
| Writing direction | Right-to-left |
Ḫāʾ or Khāʼ (خ, transliterated as ḫ (DIN-31635), ḵ (Hans Wehr), kh (ALA-LC) or ẖ (ISO 233)) is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being ṯāʼ, ḏāl, ḍād, ẓāʼ, ġayn). It is based on the ḥāʾ ح. It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪍, South Arabian 𐩭, and Ge'ez ኀ.
It represents the sound [x] or [χ] in Modern Standard Arabic. The pronunciation of خ is very similar to German, Irish, and Polish unpalatalised "ch", Russian х (Cyrillic Kha), Greek χ and Peninsular Spanish and Southern Cone "j". In name and shape, it is a variant of ḥāʾ. South Semitic also kept the phoneme separate, and it appears as South Arabian , Ge'ez Ḫarm ኀ. Its numerical value is 600 (see Abjad numerals). In most European languages, it is mostly romanized as the digraph kh.
When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ח׳.
The most common transliteration in English is "kh", e.g. Khartoum (الخرطوم al-Kharṭūm), Sheikh (شيخ).
Ḫāʾ is written is several ways depending on its position in the word:
| Position in word: | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Glyph form: (Help) |
خ | ـخ | ـخـ | خـ |
Ḫā has no derivatives.
01Character encodings
| Preview | خ | ﺥ | ﺦ | ﺧ | ﺨ | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | ARABIC LETTER KHAH | ARABIC LETTER KHAH ISOLATED FORM |
ARABIC LETTER KHAH FINAL FORM |
ARABIC LETTER KHAH INITIAL FORM |
ARABIC LETTER KHAH MEDIAL FORM | |||||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex |
| Unicode | 1582 | U+062E | 65189 | U+FEA5 | 65190 | U+FEA6 | 65191 | U+FEA7 | 65192 | U+FEA8 |
| UTF-8 | 216 174 | D8 AE | 239 186 165 | EF BA A5 | 239 186 166 | EF BA A6 | 239 186 167 | EF BA A7 | 239 186 168 | EF BA A8 |
| Numeric character reference | خ | خ | ﺥ | ﺥ | ﺦ | ﺦ | ﺧ | ﺧ | ﺨ | ﺨ |
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Ḫāʾ”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
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