The Hebrew Alphabet: 22 Letters

Hebrew has 22 letters, written right to left, with no capitals and no italics. That much is quickly said. The part that actually changes how you read is structural: the Hebrew alphabet is an abjad, not an alphabet in the European sense. Every one of the 22 letters is a consonant. The vowels exist as a separate layer of dots and dashes written above, below and inside the letters — and in real Israeli writing that layer is simply not there. Newspapers, road signs, WhatsApp messages, novels and government forms are all printed as bare consonants, and the reader supplies the vowels from knowing the word.

That sounds impossible until you notice you already do it. Cn y rd ths? You can, because you recognise whole words rather than decoding letters. Hebrew reading works the same way, helped enormously by the fact that Hebrew words are built from three-letter roots slotted into predictable patterns (see the root). Learning to read Hebrew is learning to recognise those shapes — which is why letter-by-letter sounding out, the technique that works so well for Spanish or Italian, stalls halfway through your first real sentence.

The 22 letters, in order

Read the table across: the letter, its name, the sound it makes in Modern Israeli Hebrew, how this guide writes that sound in the romanization line, and its final form if it has one.

Five letters change shape when they end a word — כ becomes ך, מ becomes ם, נ becomes ן, פ becomes ף, צ becomes ץ. Nothing about the sound changes; it is purely positional, and it gets its own page: the five final letters.

This is not a one-letter-one-sound system

Here is the fact to absorb on day one, because every later spelling difficulty grows out of it. Modern Israeli Hebrew has fewer sounds than it has letters. Distinctions that were audible two thousand years ago have merged, but the spelling never caught up:

• א and ע are both silent. עברית ivrít and אמת emét begin with nothing but their vowel.
• ח and כ (without its dot) are both the throaty ch of Bach.
• ט and ת are both plain t.
• ק and כּ (with its dot) are both k.
• ו and ב (without its dot) are both v.
• שׂ and ס are both s.

So a Hebrew word carries information your ear cannot recover. Hearing or does not tell you whether to write אור ("light") or עור ("skin"); hearing kar does not tell you קר ("cold") from כר ("pillow"). Spelling has to be learned as spelling, word by word — there is no shortcut, and Israeli schoolchildren spend years on exactly this. The upside is that once you know a word's spelling, you also know something about its meaning, because letters travel with roots. Each merged pair is worked through on merged pairs, and the two silent letters get their own page.

The letters that moonlight as vowels

Three letters — ו, י and ה (plus א in some positions) — do double duty. They are consonants, but they also stand in for vowels, a job traditionally called matres lectionis, "mothers of reading":

• ו spells o and u: תודה todá, שולחן shulkhán.
• י spells i and e: שיעור shi'úr, אין en.
• ה marks a final a or e and is not pronounced there: תודה todá, מורה moré.

This is the mechanism that makes unpointed Hebrew readable at all. Modern spelling — כתיב מלא, "full spelling" — deliberately adds these letters wherever they help, which is why an Israeli writes תוכנית, מילה and בניין rather than the shorter classical forms. This guide always shows you the full modern spelling; the rules behind it live on כתיב מלא.

How to read the examples in this guide

Because Hebrew's written form and its spoken form are genuinely two different strings, every example here carries four pieces. It is worth knowing what each one is before you meet a few hundred of them:

The dots you see in that middle row are niqqud, the vowel layer. You will meet it in dictionaries, in children's books, in poetry and in the Bible — and nowhere else. Treat it as a pronunciation aid, not as spelling: the niqqud system explains what each sign does. The acute accent in the romanization marks stress, which in Hebrew is contrastive and therefore worth attending to from the start (stress).

Alphabetical order is not trivia

In English the alphabet is a filing system and nothing more. In Hebrew the 22 letters are also numbers, and that keeps the order alive in daily life. א is 1, ב is 2, ג is 3, and so on. So:

• School years are lettered: כיתה א׳ is first grade, כיתה ז׳ is seventh — not "grade Z".
• Clauses, options, form versions and building floors are lettered: סעיף ב׳, טופס א׳, קומה ב׳.
• Hebrew dates use letters: ה׳ באייר, the fifth of Iyar.
• Dictionaries, indexes and contact lists sort by this order, so you cannot look a word up without it.

That little mark after the letter (׳, a geresh) is what tells you the letter is being used as a number rather than as part of a word — see letters as numbers. The names of the letters, and what to do with them when you spell your surname over the phone, are on letter names and order.

Common Mistakes

1. Pronouncing the final ה. At the end of a word, ה is silent — it is there to mark the vowel, not to be heard.

2. Reading ב as a hard b everywhere. Without its dot, ב is v. This is why the city is Tel Aviv and not "Tel Abib".

3. Leaving a letter in its non-final shape. A word ending in m, n, kh, f or ts must switch to ם ן ך ף ץ. Writing שלומ instead of שלום looks, to an Israeli, roughly like writing a sentence with no space after it.

4. Spelling by ear. Because א and ע sound identical, and so do ח and כ, and ט and ת, you cannot deduce a spelling from a pronunciation. עברית is written with ע, and no amount of listening will tell you that.

Key Takeaways

• Hebrew has 22 letters, all consonants, written right to left, with no capitals.
• Vowels are a separate optional layer of dots (niqqud) that real Israeli text leaves out; the reader supplies them by recognising the word.
• ו, י and ה double as vowel markers, which is what makes unpointed text readable — and modern full spelling (כתיב מלא) adds them generously.
• Modern Hebrew has fewer sounds than letters: א/ע, ח/כ, ט/ת, ק/כּ, ו/ב and שׂ/ס have merged, so spelling must be learned as spelling.
• Five letters take a different shape word-finally (ך ם ן ף ץ), and the alphabetical order doubles as a number system you will meet on forms, school years and dates.