Hebrew punctuation
Hebrew punctuation is similar to that of English and other Western languages, Modern Hebrew having imported additional punctuation marks from these languages in order to avoid the ambiguities sometimes occasioned by the relative paucity of such symbols in Biblical Hebrew.
Punctuation
Quotation marks
| Standard | Alternate |
With most printed Hebrew texts from the early 1970s and before, opening quotation marks are low, and closing ones are high, often going above the letters themselves. An example of this system is.
However, this distinction in Hebrew between opening and closing quotation marks has mostly disappeared, and today, quotations are most often punctuated as they are in English, with both quotation marks high. This is due to the advent of the Hebrew keyboard layout, which lacks the opening quotation mark ⟨„⟩, as well as to the lack in Hebrew of "smart quotes" in certain word processing programs.
In addition, the quotation mark is often used for the similar looking but different gershayim mark ⟨⟩, as that too is absent from the Hebrew keyboard.
| Standard | Alternative | Names |
| "…" | "…" | merkhaʾot — ; a similar punctuation mark unique to Hebrew is called gershayim — |
Period, question mark, exclamation mark, comma
Periods, question marks, exclamation marks, and commas are used as in English.A Hebrew period in a traditional serif face usually looks like a tiny tilted square. This is also true for the dot part of the question mark, and exclamation mark.
In Arabic, which is also written from right to left, the question mark ⟨؟⟩ is mirrored right-to-left from the English question mark. Hebrew is also written right-to-left, but uses a question mark that appears on the page in the same orientation as the English ⟨?⟩.
Colon and ''''
Stemming from Biblical Hebrew, a sof pasuq ⟨ ⟩ is the equivalent of a period, and is used in some writings such as prayer books. Since a sof pasuq is absent from the Hebrew keyboard layout, and looks very similar to the colon ⟨:⟩, a colon is often substituted for it.| Glyph | Unicode | Name |
| U+05C3 | HEBREW PUNCTUATION SOF PASUQ | |
| : | U+003A | COLON |
Vertical bar and ''paseq''
The paseq ⟨⟩ originates from Biblical Hebrew. As it is not on a standard Hebrew keyboard, a vertical bar ⟨|⟩ is often used instead. However, it is seldom if ever used in modern Israeli Hebrew, and is not mentioned on the Academy of the Hebrew Language's guide to modern Hebrew punctuation. The height of the paseq depends on the font, but it is generally the same as the letter.Like much Biblical Hebrew punctuation, the meaning of the paseq is not known, although a number of hypotheses exist. The word itself means "separator", but this name was a medieval innovation by later Jews; the root does not exist in the Biblical Hebrew canon. James Kennedy, an English hebraist, wrote a book about the paseq in which he hypothesized that it was an ancient mark serving the same purpose as the modern word sic. The Westminster Leningrad Codex contains over 500 paseqs; William Wickes, an influential scholar in this area, divide them into nine classes; Wilhelm Gesenius, drawing on Wickes, divided them into five:
- as a divider between two words which end and begin with the same letters, e.g.
- between identical or very similar words, e.g.
- between words which are to a high degree contradictory, e.g.
- between words otherwise liable to be wrongly connected, e.g., which prevents the somewhat bizarre phrase from being wrongly read as , meaning button.
- "and lastly, between heterogeneous terms, as Eleazar the High Priest, and Joshua"
| Glyph | Unicode | Name |
| U+05C0 | HEBREW PUNCTUATION PASEQ | |
| U+007C | VERTICAL LINE |
Hyphen and ''maqaf''
The maqaf ⟨⟩ is the Hebrew hyphen ⟨-⟩, and has virtually the same purpose for connecting two words as in English. It is different from the hyphen in its positioning and it has a biblical origin, unlike many other Modern Hebrew punctuation symbols, which have simply been imported from European languages.The original purpose of the maqaf was to show that two words should be pronounced in one ṭaʿam. For example, a person singing the word Tel Aviv| may take a pause for breath between and, while one singing the word may not do the same. This use continues into the present beyond reprintings of Biblical texts; for example, the sheet music for modern Hebrew songs, such as, are normally printed with them. The maqaf is well-used in Hebrew typography; most books and newspapers use it and have the hyphens higher than one would find in English. In typed documents, however, it is frequently not used because it is absent from the keyboard or cumbersome to type. As a result, a standard English hyphen ⟨-⟩ is most often used in online writings. This situation can be compared to that of users writing in Latin alphabets using the easily available hyphen-minus ⟨-⟩ over hyphen ⟨‐⟩, minus ⟨−⟩, en dash ⟨–⟩, and em dash ⟨—⟩.
It is possible to insert maqaf using keyboard combinations: e.g. Option key + Backslash on MacOS.
| Glyph | Unicode | Name |
| U+05be | HEBREW PUNCTUATION MAQAF | |
| - | U+002d | HYPHEN-MINUS |
Brackets/parentheses
Brackets or parentheses, ⟨⟩ becomes an opening bracket, and ⟨(⟩ a closing bracket, the opposite from English, which is written left to right.Israeli currency
The shekel sign is the currency sign for the Israeli currency, in the way $, £, and € exist for other currencies. The shekel sign, like the dollar sign ⟨$⟩, is usually placed to the left of the number, but since Hebrew is written from right to left, the symbol is actually written after the number. It is either not separated from the preceding number, or is separated only by a thin space.Unlike the dollar sign, the new shekel sign is not used that often when handwriting monetary amounts, and is generally replaced by the abbreviation .
The short-lived Israeli old shekel, on the other hand, which symbol was, is rarely referred to in Israeli texts; both due to its lifespan of only five years and the fact that due to hyperinflation it lost value daily, so that referring to a value in Israeli old shekels, even in retrospective writing, is essentially meaningless without knowing the exact time the figure was quoted. As prices changed so rapidly, advertising of the time predominately used dollars; when the shekel was referred to at all, it was with the letter S or its full Hebrew name—; although certain banks, such as Bank Leumi, used the letter to refer to it on checks, as well as the Latin letters "I.S."
The Israeli pound was the Israeli Currency until 1980. Its sign is I£, and its abbreviation is.
''Geresh'' and ''gershayim''
| Geresh | Apostrophe used as a geresh |
| Gershayim | Quotation marks used as gershayim |
The geresh ⟨⟩, is the Hebrew equivalent of a period in abbreviations, in addition to being attached to Hebrew letters to indicate sounds like soft g and ch in foreign names such as Charles and Jake. The gershayim ⟨⟩, is a Hebrew symbol indicating that a sequence of characters is an acronym, and is placed before the last character of the word. Owing to a Hebrew keyboard's having neither a geresh nor gershayim, they are usually replaced online with, respectively, the visually similar apostrophe ⟨'⟩ and quotation mark ⟨"⟩. The quotation mark and apostrophe are higher than the geresh and gershayim: where the latter are placed level with the top of Hebrew letters, the apostrophe and quotation marks are above them.
Some Hebrew-specific fonts, such as David, Narkisim and FrankRuehl, do not feature the apostrophe and quotation marks as such but use the geresh and gershayim to substitute for them.
| Glyph | Unicode | Name |
| U+05f3 | HEBREW PUNCTUATION GERESH | |
| U+05f4 | HEBREW PUNCTUATION GERSHAYIM | |
| ' | U+0027 | APOSTROPHE |
| " | U+0022 | QUOTATION MARK |
Mathematics
Mathematical expressions are written in Hebrew using the same symbols as in English, including Western numerals, which are written left to right. The only variant that exists is an alternative plus sign, which is a plus sign which looks like an inverted capital T. Unicode has this symbol at position U+FB29 "Hebrew letter alternative plus sign". The reason for this practice is that it avoids the writing of a symbol "+" that looks like a Christian cross.Reversed ''nun''
is a rare character found in two Biblical Hebrew texts. Although in Judaic literature it is known as nun hafukha, it does not function as any sort of letter in the text. It is not part of a word, and it is not read aloud in any way. It is simply a mark that is written, and is therefore a punctuation mark, not a letter. Also, it is surrounded by space.While it depends on the particular manuscript or printed edition, it is found in nine places: twice in the Book of Numbers, and seven times in Psalm 107. It is uncertain today what it was intended to signify.
In many manuscripts, it does not even resemble a transformed nun at all, and when it does, it sometimes appears reversed, sometimes inverted, and sometimes turned through 180°. Other times it appears to look like the letter Z.
| Glyph | Unicode | Name |
| U+05C6 | HEBREW PUNCTUATION NUN HAFUKHA |
Hebrew points (vowels)
| With vowel points | Without vowel points |
These signs indicate voweling or some other aspects of the pronunciation of a letter or word. While in Modern Hebrew they are not generally used outside poetry and children's books, a vowel point or other diacritic is occasionally added to resolve ambiguity.
One of these neqqudot, the rafe, is no longer used in Hebrew, even though it is routinely used in Yiddish spelling.
| Glyph | Unicode | Name |
| U+05B0 | SHEVA | |
| U+05B1 | HATEF SEGOL | |
| U+05B2 | HATEF PATAH | |
| U+05B3 | HATEF QAMATS | |
| U+05B4 | HIRIQ | |
| U+05B5 | TSERE | |
| U+05B6 | SEGOL | |
| U+05B7 | PATAH | |
| U+05B8 | QAMATS | |
| U+05B9 | HOLAM | |
| U+05BB | QUBUTS | |
| U+05BC | DAGESH, MAPIQ, OR SHURUQ | |
| U+05BD | MATEG | |
| U+05BF | RAFE | |
| U+05C1 | SHIN DOT | |
| U+05C2 | SIN DOT | |
| U+05C4 | MARK UPPER DOT | |
| U+05C5 | MARK LOWER DOT |