גרש and גרשיים: Acronyms and Foreign Sounds

Two marks do an enormous amount of work in written Hebrew, and both of them look, to an English eye, like ordinary punctuation that somebody left in the wrong place. They are not punctuation. They are part of the spelling of the word.

• גרש (geresh), a single mark: ׳ — Unicode U+05F3.
• גרשיים (gershayim), a double mark: ״ — Unicode U+05F4.

The placement rule is worth learning in one breath, because it never varies: the geresh goes after a letter; the gershayim goes before the last letter of the word. ג׳ינס, וכו׳, כיתה ז׳ — geresh, always trailing. צה״ל, ק״ג, עו״ד, מנכ״ל — gershayim, always one letter in from the end, no matter how long the string is.

This page owns the marks: what they are, where they sit, and which one a given abbreviation takes. How an acronym is pronounced once decoded is a separate problem, handled on ראשי תיבות.

The geresh as a sound extender

Hebrew's twenty-two letters do not cover the sounds it has been borrowing for the last century: no j, no ch of "church", no zh. The geresh supplies them — put the mark on the nearest native letter and the pair counts as a new consonant.

A narrower set appears in careful transcription of Arabic (academic writing and quality journalism): ח׳ for خ, ת׳ for ث, ד׳ for ذ, and ע׳ — sometimes ר׳ — for غ, so a sheikh is שייח׳. Add ו׳ for w, which you will rarely meet outside a linguistics text.

The geresh as an abbreviation mark

The same mark has a second, unrelated job: it says "this single word has been cut short", and it goes after the last letter that survived. The Academy's rule is one line — a geresh serves to shorten a word, and its place is after the last written letter of the shortened word — with וגו׳, מס׳, עמ׳ and ר׳ as its examples (כללי הפיסוק §29, from an archived copy of hebrew-academy.org.il dated 31 December 2024).

Two things follow. The shortened word is read out in full, never spelled: עמ׳ is amúd. And it is one word only — compress two and you are in gershayim territory, however short the result. That is also why a first initial takes a geresh, ד׳ בן־גוריון, and never a full stop.

It likewise flags one Hebrew letter used as a number: כיתה ז׳, יום ג׳, ה׳ באייר, שלב א׳ — a system with its own page, letters as numerals.

Gershayim: one letter in from the end

When two or more words — or two components of one word, as the next section shows — are compressed into their initial letters, the mark is the double one and it sits before the final letter. Length is irrelevant: ת״א has two letters, תנ״ך three, מנכ״ל four, and the gershayim is in the same slot in all of them.

The Academy adds a detail that settles a real writing question: the gershayim is not displaced by inflection. Add a plural or a feminine ending and the mark stays in front of the acronym's own last letter, with the suffix trailing behind it — ח״כים, רמטכ״לים, מנכ״לית, and the adjectives תנ״כי and צה״לי (כללי הפיסוק §30, same archived copy).

It also appears on multi-letter numerals — י״א, ט״ו, ל״ג, and years such as תשפ״ו.

Units, money and company names

This is where the distinction stops being academic and starts deciding what you write on a shopping list. Almost every unit and price abbreviation takes gershayim, on a rule most learners never meet: the Academy extends the double mark to a foreign word made of two components even when the word is written as one — such as מ״מ, ק״מ, ק״ג, even though they stand for words written as a single word (כללי הפיסוק §31ב, same archived copy). קילוגרם is one word on the page, but kilo + gram underneath.

Money has a sign as well as an abbreviation: ₪ (U+20AA) goes on price tags and screens, ש״ח in running text, and in everyday speech neither is expanded — a price is simply shkalím, while the full שקל חדש belongs to official and legal prose. בע״מ is the Hebrew Ltd, welded onto a company's registered name.

The characters themselves, and the ASCII trap

On a screen ׳ and ״ look almost exactly like the ASCII apostrophe and double quote, and you will meet the ASCII ones constantly — from Israelis, in email, on shop signs. The reason is mechanical rather than careless: the standard Hebrew keyboard has no plain key for either mark. The apostrophe and quote keys give U+0027 and U+0022, and the real characters hide behind a modifier combination most people never learn, so a דק׳ that is typed rather than typeset routinely arrives with a straight ASCII apostrophe instead. Do not read that as the Hebrew marks being optional — three things go wrong with the substitutes:

• Orthography. A quotation mark belongs around a phrase, not inside a word; an acronym written with a straight double quote is the same class of error as an English contraction written with a backtick.
• Direction. U+05F3 and U+05F4 are strong right-to-left characters and the ASCII pair are direction-neutral, so next to a number, a Latin word or a line break the substitute takes its direction from its neighbours and can hop to the other side of the word — the mechanism described on punctuation in a right-to-left text.
• Searchability. A search for ד״ר with the Hebrew mark does not match a document typed with the ASCII one, or the reverse. Israeli search engines paper over this; a database query will not. Which key to press is typing Hebrew's problem.

Common Mistakes

1. Dropping the geresh from a borrowed word. This one changes the pronunciation, not just the look.

2. Reading the mark as decoration and pronouncing the bare letter. English speakers see ג and say g, צ and say ts — which is what those letters say without the mark, and not with it.

3. Choosing the wrong mark for a unit. A single geresh means one word was cut short; a unit built from two components is an acronym and takes the double mark.

4. Leaving the mark off a unit or a price altogether. English writes "2 kg" and "50 NIS" with nothing at all, and the habit transfers straight across.

Key Takeaways

• Geresh ׳ (U+05F3) goes after a letter; gershayim ״ (U+05F4) goes before the last letter — whatever the length of the string.
• The geresh creates consonants Hebrew lacks — ג׳ = j, צ׳ = tsh, ז׳ = zh, plus ח׳ ת׳ ד׳ ע׳ in Arabic transcription — so a word carrying one is almost always a loanword.
• The geresh also cuts one word short (עמ׳, וכו׳, דק׳, רח׳, ד׳ בן־גוריון) and marks a single letter used as a number (כיתה ז׳).
• Gershayim covers anything built from two or more components, including a foreign word written as one: ק״ג, ק״מ, ס״מ, קמ״ש, and likewise מ״ר, ש״ח, בע״מ.
• The gershayim does not move when the word inflects: מנכ״לית, ח״כים, צה״לי.
• Money has both a sign and an abbreviation — ₪ (U+20AA) on price tags, ש״ח in text — and in everyday speech neither is expanded to שקל חדש.
• The ASCII apostrophe and quote are the wrong characters, but the Hebrew keyboard has no easy key for the right ones, so both forms are everywhere. Type U+05F3 and U+05F4 when it matters.