The Arabic letter غ is the nineteenth letter of the Arabic alphabet, one of the six letters not in the twenty-two akin to the Phoenician alphabet, it represents the sound or. In name and shape, it is a variant of ʻayn. Its numerical value is 1000. In the Persian language it represents ~ and is the twenty-second letter in the new Persian alphabet. A voiced velar fricative or a voiced uvular fricative merged with ʻayin in most languages except for Arabic, Ugaritic, and older varieties of the Canaanite languages. Canaanite languages and Hebrew later also merged it with ʻayin, and this merger was complete in Tiberian Hebrew. The South Arabian alphabet retained a symbol for ġ, ?. Biblical Hebrew, as of the 3rd century BCE, apparently still distinguished the phonemes ġ /ʁ/ and ḫ /χ/, based on transcriptions in the Septuagint. The letter ghayn is sometimes used to represent the voiced velar plosive in loan words and names in Arabic and is then often pronounced, not. Other letters, such as gimel|, qāf|, kāf|, can be used to transcribe in loan words and names, depending on whether the localvariety of Arabic in the country has the phoneme, which letter represents it if it does, and on whether it is customary in the country to use that letter to transcribe. For instance, in Egypt, where ج is pronounced as in all situations, even when speaking Modern Standard Arabic, ج is used to transcribe foreign in virtually all contexts. In many cases غ is pronounced in loan words as expected—, not —even though the original language had. When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ע׳. In English, the letter غ in Arabic names is usually transliterated as ‹gh›, ‹ġ›, or simply ‹g›, e.g. بغداد Baghdād 'Baghdad', or غزة Ghazzah 'Gaza', the latter of which does not render the sound ~ accurately. The closest equivalent sound known to most English speakers is the Parisian French "r". Ghayn is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:
