Ḫāʾ
Ḫāʾ or Khāʾ or Xe, ḵ, kh or ẖ ), is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet. It is based on the ḥāʾ ح. It represents the sound or in Modern Standard Arabic. The pronunciation of خ is very similar to German, Irish, and Polish unpalatalised "ch", Russian х, and Spanish "j". In name and shape, it is a variant of ḥāʾ. South Semitic also kept the phoneme separate, and it appears as South Arabian, Ge'ez Ḫarm ኀ. Its numerical value is 600.
When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ח׳.
The most common transliteration in English is "kh", e.g. Khartoum, Sheikh.
Ḫāʾ is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:
