Zayin (also spelled zain or zayn or simply zay) is the seventh letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Zayin , Hebrew Zayin , Aramaic Zain , Syriac Zayn ܙ, and Arabic Zayn or Zāy . It represents the sound . The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek zeta (Ζ), Etruscan z , Latin Z, and Cyrillic Ze З. Meaning The Proto-Sinaitic glyph may have been called , based on a hieroglyph depicting a "manacle". The Phoenician letter appears to be named after a sword or other weapon. In Mishnaic Hebrew, () means "sword", and the verb () means "to arm". In Modern Hebrew slang, () means "penis" and () is a vulgar term which generally means to perform sexual intercourse, although the older meaning survives in ("armed struggle") (), ("armed forces") (), and () ("armed, i.e., reinforced concrete"). Arabic zāy The letter is named . It has two forms, depending on its position in the word: The similarity to is likely a function of the original Syriac forms converging to a single symbol, requiring that one of them be distinguished as a dot; a similar process occurred to and . The same letter has another name – že () – in a number of languages, such as Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, Urdu and Uyghur (see K̡ona Yezik̡). Hebrew zayin In modern Hebrew, the frequency of the usage of zayin, out of all the letters, is 0.88%. Hebrew spelling: In modern Hebrew, the combination (zayin followed by a geresh) is used in loanwords and foreign names to denote as in vion. Significance Numerical value (gematria) In gematria, zayin represents the number seven, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years it means 7000 (i.e. in numbers would be the future date 7754). Use in Torah scroll Zayin, in addition to ʻayin, gimel, teth, nun, shin, and tzadi, is one of the seven letters which receive a special crown (called a tagin) when written in a Sefer Torah (Torah scroll). Meaning as a noun For the Mishnaic and Modern Hebrew meaning of 'zayin' as a noun, see above. It is one of several Hebrew letters that have an additional meaning as a noun. The others are: bet [, the 2nd letter], whose name is a grammatical form of the word for 'house' (); vav [, the 6th letter], whose name means 'hook' (); kaf [, the 11th], whose name means