What is "tsade"

alt. The eighteenth letter of many Semitic alphabets/abjads (Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and others). n. The eighteenth letter of many Semitic alphabets/abjads (Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and others).

(also spelled , Tsade, , , Tzadi, Sadhe, Tzaddik) is the eighteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Çādē , Hebrew Ṣādi , Aramaic Ṣāḏē , Syriac Ṣāḏē ܨ, and Arabic . Its oldest sound value is probably , although there is a variety of pronunciation in different modern Semitic languages and their dialects. It represents the coalescence of three Proto-Semitic " emphatic consonants" in Canaanite. Arabic, which kept the phonemes separate, introduced variants of and to express the three (see , ). In Aramaic, these emphatic consonants coalesced instead with ʿayin and ṭēt, respectively, thus Hebrew ereṣ ארץ (earth) is araʿ ארע in Aramaic.

The Phoenician letter is continued in the Greek San (Ϻ) and possibly Sampi (Ϡ), and in Etruscan ???? Ś. It may have inspired the form of the letter Tse in the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabet.

The corresponding letter of the Ugaritic alphabet is ???? ṣade.

The letter is known as "tsadik" in Yiddish, and Hebrew speakers often give it that name as well. This name for the letter probably originated from a fast recitation of the alphabet (i.e., "tsadi, qoph" -> "tsadiq, qoph"), influenced by the Hebrew word tzadik, meaning 'righteous person'.