Taw, tav, or taf is the twenty-second and last letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Tāw , Hebrew Tav , Aramaic Taw , Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic ت Tāʼ (22nd in abjadi order, 3rd in modern order). In Arabic, it also gives rise to the derived letter Ṯāʼ. Its original sound value is . The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek tau (Τ), Latin T, and Cyrillic Т. Origins of taw Taw is believed to be derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing a tally mark (viz. a decussate cross) Z9 Arabic tāʼ The letter is named . It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word: Final (fatha, then with a sukun on it, pronounced , though diacritics are normally omitted) is used to mark feminine gender for third-person perfective/past tense verbs, while final (, ) is used to mark past-tense second-person singular masculine verbs, final (, ) to mark past-tense second-person singular feminine verbs, and final (, ) to mark past-tense first-person singular verbs. The plural form of Arabic letter is (), a palindrome. Recently, the isolated has been used online as an emoticon, because it resembles a smiling face. Tāʼ marbūṭa An alternative form called (ـَة, ة) (), "bound ") is used at the end of words to mark feminine gender for nouns and adjectives. Regular , to distinguish it from , is referred to as (, "open "). In words such as ('letter, message', 'epistle'), the () + combination () is transliterated as or ( or ), and pronounced as (as if there were only a ). Historically, was pronounced as the sound in all positions, but now the sound is dropped in coda positions. However, when a word ending with a is suffixed with a grammatical case ending or any other suffix, the is clearly pronounced. For example, the word ('letter, message', 'epistle') is pronounced as in pausa but is pronounced in the nominative case ( being the nominative case ending), in the genitive case ( being the genitive case ending), and in the accusative case ( being the accusative case ending). When the possessive suffix ('my') is added, it becomes ('my letter') . The /t/ is also always pronounced when the word is in construct state (), for example in ('The Epistle of Forgiveness'). Note that the isolated and final forms of this letter combine the shape of