U+05D0 "א" Hebrew Letter Alef Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
א
U+05D0 "א" Hebrew Letter Alef is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, serving as a silent consonant that typically represents a glottal stop or no sound in modern Hebrew, though historically it was a consonant with a distinct phonetic value. In the Hebrew numerical system known as gematria, alef corresponds to the number one, and it plays a foundational role in the language's script and religious texts, including the Torah, where it appears as the initial letter of the Ten Commandments in Exodus. Its shape is believed by some to derive from the Proto-Canaanite symbol for an ox head, reflecting its ancient origins and cultural significance in Jewish tradition and linguistic history.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+05D0 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Hebrew Letter Alef |
| Block | Hebrew |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Right To Left |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | א |
| HTML Hex Encoding | א |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xD7 0x90 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x05D0 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000005D0 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u05d0 |