taf

Taf is a term most often encountered in discussions of Semitic writing systems, where it refers to the letter that corresponds to the “t” sound. In the Hebrew alphabet, the twenty-second and final letter is ת, commonly transliterated as tav or taw in modern usage. In some older or non-Hebrew sources, the same character is spelled "taf." The letter represents the voiceless alveolar stop /t/ and carries the Hebrew numeral value of 400.

The name and form of the letter have historical roots in the Phoenician script, from which the Hebrew tav and its cognates descended. The Phoenician letter taw gave rise to the Greek tau and the Latin letter T, establishing a direct lineage for many alphabetic systems used today. In Hebrew, tav/taf is a standard consonant in both secular and liturgical texts and appears in various word positions, including as the final letter in some words (though tav itself does not have a distinct final form in Hebrew).

In digital text encoding, the Hebrew letter tav is assigned the Unicode code point U+05EA. Its usage is routine in modern Hebrew orthography, where it is pronounced as /t/ in most dialects and collates with a wide range of Hebrew vocabulary. The term taf also appears in discussions of transliteration and historical scripts, where it is acknowledged as one of the variants used to refer to this same letter.