ALEF

Alef, also spelled aleph or alef, is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Its symbol is the character א. In Hebrew orthography, alef historically represented a glottal stop; in Modern Hebrew it is usually not pronounced as a consonant and commonly serves as a placeholder for vowels, functioning as a mater lectionis rather than a distinct sound.

The name alef derives from the Semitic word for “ox,” reflecting its origins in the Proto-Canaanite and Phoenician letter forms. The Phoenician letter aleph depicted an ox head, and the shape evolved into the Hebrew alef. The letter is the ancestor of the Greek alpha and the Latin A, illustrating its long-standing influence on alphabetic writing.

In Hebrew numerals, alef has the value of 1. It appears in words and proper names at the beginning of phrases and across the language, often carrying little phonetic weight by itself but contributing to the vowel structure of syllables around it.

Alef has no separate final form; it is written the same way (א) in all positions within a word. Its function and shape are preserved in written Hebrew across secular and religious contexts, though pronunciation varies by speaker and tradition.

Beyond Hebrew, related characters appear in other Semitic scripts. Arabic uses a distinct but historically related character, alif (ا), which represents a long vowel or glottal onset in Arabic. The shared lineage of aleph/alif reflects a common origin in early Semitic writing systems. In Jewish tradition and mysticism, alef is sometimes associated with unity and the number one.