Spellings Israelis Themselves Argue About

Show an Israeli a text you have written and you may get a correction. Show it to a second Israeli and you may get the correction reversed. This is not a sign that your Hebrew is bad; it is a sign that you have landed on one of a few dozen words where the country has not settled, and where two literate writers can hold opposite views in complete good faith.

Treat this page as literacy rather than trivia. The point is not to memorise a "right" answer — for several of these there isn't one — but to recognise a contested word when you meet it, so that a confident correction does not knock you off a spelling that was fine.

Why the disagreement exists at all

The Academy of the Hebrew Language is a statutory body: its decisions, once published in the official gazette, bind government ministries and the state education system. Its authority is therefore legally real and socially weak. Newspapers keep their own style sheets, Hebrew Wikipedia has a written spelling policy of its own, publishers have house rules going back decades, and for a great many writers the de facto arbiter is whatever the Word spellchecker underlines in red.

On top of that, the rulebook moved. The כללי הכתיב המלא were reissued in 2017, widening where an o gets a ו and where an i gets a י. Anyone educated before that learned different spellings and mostly kept them. So a "wrong" spelling is very often simply an older correct one. The broader argument about who owns the language is on the Academy vs what Israelis actually say.

The doubling disputes

These are the most visible, because a doubled letter is impossible to miss. ktiv male doubles a consonantal ו or י inside a word; the older spellings, inherited from pointed text, wrote one.

The added ו

The 2017 revision generalised writing o with a ו, including where the vowel comes from a kamatz katan and older spelling wrote nothing. This produced a batch of words that look new to anyone over forty:

א or ה at the end

A separate quarrel, and an older one. A group of nouns entered Hebrew through Aramaic, where the definite ending is א, and the Academy has ruled that in Hebrew they take ה. Many writers — and a great many printers, shop signs and legal documents — kept the א.

אימא, and a word that is not disputed

אימא / אמא is the argument everyone knows. The Academy's plene rules give a yod for the i of íma, so אימא; a very large share of Israelis — including many who write professionally — write אמא, because that is the form they learned and because it looks like the word rather than a spelling exercise.

Worth being precise here, since the pair is often quoted loosely: אבא is not part of the dispute. Its vowel is an a, and a has no letter in either system, so there is nothing to add or remove. Everybody writes אבא. The same asymmetry runs through the whole set — only i, o and u can be argued about, because only they can be written at all.

Compounds: one word, two words, or a maqaf

The Academy forms many compounds with a maqaf ־: בין־לאומי, דו־צדדי, חד־פעמי, תת־מודע, אי־הבנה. Ordinary writing very often welds them into one word — בינלאומי is overwhelmingly the commoner spelling — or drops the maqaf for a plain space. All three appear in edited text. See the maqaf for the rule itself.

Foreign names and words

Transcription multiplies the problem, because there is no original Hebrew spelling to appeal to. Three live patterns:

• The initial ו. The Academy keeps a word-initial consonantal ו single — ושינגטון, ויסקי — while usage very often doubles it: וושינגטון, וויסקי. Both are printed daily.
• The geresh. ג׳ורג׳ needs a real geresh ׳ on both letters. Typed on an older keyboard layout it comes out with the ASCII apostrophe instead, and that spelling is everywhere online without anyone regarding it as a statement of principle. See typing Hebrew.
• Loan vs Hebrew word. Email circulates as אימייל, as the clipped מייל, and set in Latin letters inside a Hebrew sentence — the third option being ordinary in professional writing. The rest of the transcription system is on spelling foreign words.

The newest argument: gender-inclusive spelling

The only dispute on this page that is genuinely about politics rather than orthographic history. Hebrew forces a gender on every plural, so writers who want to address a mixed group have improvised: סטודנטים/ות, dot-separated forms, and various hybrid characters. None of it is standard, all of it is visible in universities, activist writing and some journalism, and the Academy has declined to endorse the innovations. It is argued about in the terms people argue about language change generally — see gender-inclusive Hebrew.

Common Mistakes

These are the errors that are wrong on both sides of every dispute above — over-applying a rule you have just learned.

1. Putting the ו in the wrong slot. צוהריים has it after the צ, matching the vowel it spells.

2. Adding a yod to a closed syllable. ktiv male writes the i with a yod in an open syllable only.

3. Doubling a ו that is a vowel. Only a consonantal ו doubles.

4. Writing both endings at once. A word takes א or ה, never a compromise.

Key Takeaways

• The Academy's authority is legally real and socially weak; papers, publishers, Wikipedia and the Word spellchecker are the arbiters most writers actually obey.
• The 2017 כללי הכתיב המלא changed the rules within living memory, so many "wrong" spellings are simply the previous correct ones.
• The recurring fault lines: doubling (תקווה/תקוה, עלייה/עליה, שנייה/שניה), an added ו (תוכנית/תכנית, צוהריים/צהריים), and final א or ה (דוגמה/דוגמא, קופסה/קופסא).
• אימא is contested; אבא is not — only i, o and u can be argued about, because only they are writable at all.
• Contested spacing is limited to prefix compounds (בין־לאומי / בינלאומי); אף אחד, שום דבר, אי אפשר and בסדר are settled.
• Foreign words multiply the variation: ושינגטון / וושינגטון, geresh versus ASCII apostrophe, אימייל / מייל or the Latin form.
• The learner's policy: write the Academy's ktiv male, read everything, correct nobody.