taw

Taw, sometimes transliterated as taw or tav, is the name of the Semitic letter that historically represented the voiceless alveolar stop /t/. In Phoenician and related ancient scripts it was called taw; in Hebrew it is known as tav. The character’s lineage extends into the Greek alphabet as tau and, through Greek, into Latin and other scripts used in the Western tradition.

Origins and development: Taw is one of the earliest consonant signs in the Phoenician alphabet, which formed the basis for many later writing systems in the Mediterranean region. The original pictographic form is thought to have represented a mark or sign, and over time the glyph was stylized in Greek to form the tau, eventually becoming the Latin T used today.

Hebrew usage: In the Hebrew alphabet, tav is the 22nd letter and has the numeric value 400 in gematria. In modern Hebrew, tav commonly represents the /t/ sound. Tav does not have a separate final form, unlike several other Hebrew letters that change shape at word endings.

Greek and Latin descendants: The Phoenician taw gave rise to the Greek letter tau (Τ, τ), which in turn yielded the Latin letter T. The continuity from taw to tau to T illustrates how a single Semitic sign influenced multiple writing traditions across centuries.

Symbolism and related terms: The name tau in Greek tradition is sometimes linked to the same origin as taw, illustrating the interconnectedness of Semitic and Hellenic scripts. In Christian contexts, the tau (and thus its Semitic ancestor taw) is associated with the cross shape in the form of the tau cross, though this symbolism derives from the Greek name rather than the Phoenician term.