Bet, Beth, Beh, or Vet is the second letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Bēt , Hebrew Bēt , Aramaic Bēth , Syriac Bēṯ , and Arabic . Its sound value is the voiced bilabial stop ⟨b⟩ or the voiced labiodental fricative ⟨v⟩. The letter's name means "house" in various Semitic languages (Arabic bayt, Akkadian bītu, bētu, Hebrew: bayiṯ, Phoenician bt etc.; ultimately all from Proto-Semitic *bayt-), and appears to derive from an Egyptian hieroglyph of a house by acrophony. O1 The Phoenician letter gave rise to, among others, the Greek beta (Β, β), Latin B (B, b) and Cyrillic Be (Б, б) and Ve (В, в). Origin The name bet is derived from the West Semitic word for "house" (as in Hebrew bayt בַּיִת), and the shape of the letter derives from a Proto-Sinaitic glyph that may have been based on the Egyptian hieroglyph Pr O1 which depicts a house. Arabic The Arabic letter is named (). It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word: The letter normally renders sound, except in some names and loanwords where it can also render , often Arabized as , as in (Persil). For , it may be used interchangeably with the Persian letter - pe (with 3 dots) in this case. Hebrew Bet / Vet Hebrew spelling: The Hebrew letter represents two different phonemes: a "b" sound () (bet) and a "v" sound () (vet). When Hebrew is written Ktiv menuqad (with niqqud diacritics) the two are distinguished by a dot (called a dagesh) in the centre of the letter for and no dot for . In modern Hebrew, the more commonly used Ktiv hasar niqqud spelling, which does not use diacritics, does not visually distinguish between the two phonemes. This letter is named bet and vet, following the modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation, bet and vet (), in Israel and by most Jews familiar with Hebrew, although some non-Israeli Ashkenazi speakers pronounce it beis (or bais) and veis () (or vais or vaiz). It is also named beth, following the Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation, in academic circles. In modern Hebrew the frequency of the usage of bet, out of all the letters, is 4.98%. Variations on written form/pronunciation Bet with the dagesh When the Bet appears as with a "dot" in its center, known as a dagesh, then it represents . There are various rules in Hebrew