Ḫāʾ

Ḫāʾ, Khāʾ, or Xe (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 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 ḫ, Ge'ez Ḫarm ኀ. Its numerical value is 600 (see Abjad numerals).

Arabic alphabet
Arabic script
Ḫāʾ
Arabic
خ
Phonemic representationx
Position in alphabet24
Numerical value600
Alphabetic derivatives of the Phoenician

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 in its position in the word:

Position in word Isolated Final Medial Initial
Glyph form:
(Help)		 خ‎ ـخ‎ ـخـ‎ خـ‎

Character encodings
Character information
Previewخﺥﺦﺧﺨ
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
Encodingsdecimalhexdechexdechexdechexdechex
Unicode1582U+062E65189U+FEA565190U+FEA665191U+FEA765192U+FEA8
UTF-8216 174D8 AE239 186 165EF BA A5239 186 166EF BA A6239 186 167EF BA A7239 186 168EF BA A8
Numeric character referenceخخﺥﺥﺦﺦﺧﺧﺨﺨ

See also


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