Resh


Resh is the twentieth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Rūsh, Hebrew Rēsh, Aramaic Rēsh, Syriac Rēsh ܪ, and Arabic Rāʾ ر. Its sound value is one of a number of rhotic consonants: usually or, but also or in Hebrew and North Mesopotamian Arabic.
In most Semitic alphabets, the letter resh is quite similar to the letter dalet. In the Syriac alphabet, the letters became so similar that now they are only distinguished by a dot: resh has a dot above the letter, and the otherwise identical dalet has a dot below the letter. In the Arabic alphabet, rāʼ has a longer tail than dāl. In the Aramaic and Hebrew square alphabet, resh is a rounded single stroke while dalet is a right-angle of two strokes. The similarity led to the variant spellings of the name Nebuchadnezzar and Nebuchadrezzar.
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Rho, Etruscan, Latin R, and Cyrillic Р.

Origins

The word resh is usually assumed to have come from a pictogram of a head, ultimately reflecting Proto-Semitic :wikt:Appendix:Proto-Semitic/raʾš-|*raʾš-. The word's East Semitic cognate, rēš-, was one possible phonetic reading of the Sumerian cuneiform sign for "head" in Akkadian.

Hebrew Resh

Hebrew spelling: רֵישׁ
In Hebrew, Resh represents a rhotic consonant that has different realizations for different dialects:
Resh, along with Ayin, Aleph, Hei, and Het, does not receive a dagesh by convention. In the Yemenite tradition, Resh is treated as most other consonants in that it can receive a dagesh hazak under certain circumstances. In the most widely accepted version of the Hebrew Bible, there are 17 instances of Resh being marked with a dagesh.
In gematria, Resh represents the number 200.

As abbreviation

Resh as an abbreviation can stand for Rabbi.
Resh may be found after a person's name on a gravestone to indicate that the person had been a Rabbi or to indicate the other use of Rav, as a generic term for a teacher or a personal spiritual guide.

Spelling out

Resh is used in an Israeli phrase; after a child may say something false, one may say "B'Shin Quf, Resh". These letters spell Sheqer, which is the Hebrew word for a lie. It would be akin to an English speaker saying "That's an L-I-E."

Arabic rāʾ

The letter is named rāʾ/"rāy"/"rays" راء in Arabic. It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:
It ranges between an alveolar trill, an alveolar tap, and an uvular trill .
The Unicode standard for Arabic scripts also lists a variant with a full stroke, suggesting that this form is used in certain Northern and Western African languages and some dialects in Pakistan.

Character encodings