koph

Koph is a transliteration variant used in English-language texts to denote the Hebrew letter qof (ק). It also appears in discussions of Phoenician and other Semitic scripts as a name for the same letter. In Hebrew, qof is the nineteenth letter of the alphabet, following ayin and preceding resh. Its name is carried over from the Semitic tradition, and in gematria it has the numeric value 100. The glyph for this letter is the character ק, and unlike some other Hebrew letters, qof has no distinct final form and is written the same in all positions.

In modern Hebrew pronunciation, qof typically represents the voiceless stop [k], though in some contexts—especially in loanwords and careful speech—it may be realized as a more uvular [q]. The distinction between qof and kaf in pronunciation is largely orthographic rather than phonemic in contemporary usage.

In digital text, the Hebrew qof is encoded in Unicode as U+05E7. Across transliteration schemes, qof, qoph, or kop are used to render the same letter; koph is less common but appears in older dictionaries and some academic works.