Hebrew Text

Hebrew text is used for writing scripts in the Hebrew and Yiddish languages, and predates the English language by thousands of years. Hebrew is an example of a bidirectional script, in that Hebrew letters are written and read from right to left, while numbers are read from left to right. Any English text that is embedded in Hebrew text is also read from left to right.

Hebrew uses a 27-character alphabet, and takes punctuation marks and numbers from the standard Latin (or English) alphabet. Hebrew text also includes vowel and pronunciation marks. These marks appear either as a dot (Dagesh) inside the base character, vowel marks below the character, or accents to the upper left of the character. These marks are generally only used in liturgical text, and are rarely seen in day-to-day use. There are also no uppercase letters in Hebrew.