Ṯāʾ

Ṯāʾ
Ṯāʾ
ث
Usage
Writing system	Arabic language
Phonetic usage	θ
Alphabetical position	4
History
Development	ث;
Other
Writing direction	Right-to-left
	This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

← Taw
Ṯāʾ
Ḫāʾ →
← Taw Ṯāʾ Ḫāʾ →
Arabic	ث
Phonemic representation	θ (t, s)
Position in alphabet	23
Numerical value	500
Alphabetic derivatives of the Phoenician

Ṯāʾ (ث) is one of the six letters the

ġayn). In Modern Standard Arabic it represents the voiceless dental fricative [θ], also found in English as the "th

In name and shape, it is a variant of

tāʾ (ت). Its numerical value is 500 (see Abjad numerals

The Arabic letter ث is named ثَاءْ ṯāʾ. It is written in several ways depending in its position in the word:

Position in word	Isolated	Final	Medial	Initial
Glyph form: (Help)	ث‎	ـث‎	ـثـ‎	ثـ‎

In contemporary spoken Arabic, pronunciation of ṯāʾ as [

t] in Maghrebi Arabic (except Tunisian and eastern Libyan), on the other hand in the Arabic varieties of the Mashriq (in the broad sense, including Egyptian, Sudanese and Levantine) and Hejazi Arabic, it is pronounced as the sibilant voiceless alveolar fricative [s

When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ת׳.

Common Semitic perspective

The choice of the letter

tāʾ as the base for this letter was not due to etymology (see History of the Arabic alphabet), but rather due to phonetic similarity. For other Semitic cognates of the phoneme ṯ see Sound changes between Proto-Semitic and the daughter languages

The

Character information
Preview	ث
Unicode name	ARABIC LETTER THEH
Encodings	decimal	hex
Unicode	1579	U+062B
UTF-8	216 171	D8 AB
Numeric character reference	ث	ث