Zayin

The Proto-Sinaitic glyph may have been called ziqq, based on a hieroglyph depicting a "manacle".[1]

The Phoenician letter appears to be named after a sword or other weapon. In Mishnaic Hebrew, zayin (זין‎) means "sword", and the verb lezayen (לזיין‎) means "to arm". In Modern Hebrew slang, zayin (זין‎) means "penis" and lezayen (לזין‎) is a vulgar term which generally means to perform sexual intercourse,[2][3] although the older meaning survives in maavak mezuyan ("armed struggle") (מאבק מזוין‎), kokhot mezuyanim ("armed forces") (כוחות מזוינים‎), and beton mezuyan (בטון מזוין‎) ("armed, i.e., reinforced concrete").

The letter is named zāy. It has two forms, depending on its position in the word:

The similarity to rāʼ  ر  is likely a function of the original Syriac forms converging to a single symbol, requiring that one of them be distinguished as a dot; a similar process occurred to jīm and ḥāʼ.

The same letter has another name – že (Persian pronunciation: [ʒe]) – in a number of languages, such as Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, Urdu and Uyghur (see K̡ona Yezik̡).

Orthographic variants
Various print fonts			Cursive Hebrew	Rashi script
Serif	Sans-serif	Monospaced
ז	ז	ז

In modern Hebrew, the frequency of the usage of zayin, out of all the letters, is 0.88%.

Hebrew spelling: זַיִן

In modern Hebrew, the combination ז׳‎ (zayin followed by a geresh) is used in loanwords and foreign names to denote [ʒ] as in vision.

Zain is a consonant with the /z/ sound which is a voiced alveolar fricative.

• ڤ - Ve
• پ - Pe
• گ - Gāf
• چ - Che