Kaph (also spelled kaf) is the eleventh letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician kāp , Hebrew kāf , Aramaic kāp , Syriac kāp̄ , and Arabic kāf (in abjadi order). The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek kappa (Κ), Latin K, and Cyrillic К. Origin of kaph Kaph is thought to be derived from a pictogram of a hand (in both modern Arabic and modern Hebrew, kaph כף means "palm" or "grip"), though in Arabic the a in the name of the letter (كاف) is pronounced longer than the a in the word meaning "palm" (كَف). D46 Hebrew kaf Hebrew spelling: Hebrew pronunciation The letter kaf is one of the six letters that can receive a dagesh kal. The other five are bet, gimel, daleth, pe, and tav (see Hebrew alphabet for more about these letters). There are two orthographic variants of this letter that alter the pronunciation: Kaf with the dagesh When the kaph has a "dot" in its center, known as a dagesh, it represents a voiceless velar plosive (). There are various rules in Hebrew grammar that stipulate when and why a dagesh is used. Kaf without the dagesh (khaf) When this letter appears as without the dagesh ("dot") in its center it represents , like the ch in German "Bach". In modern Israeli Hebrew the letter heth is often pronounced as a , but many communities (particularly those of Mizrahi and Sephardi origins, as well as immigrants to Israel from Arab countries and Arab Israelis) have differentiated between these letters as in other Semitic languages. Final form of kaf If the letter is at the end of a word the symbol is drawn differently. However, it does not change the pronunciation or transliteration in any way. The name for the letter is final kaf (). Four additional Hebrew letters take final forms: tsadi, mem, nun, and pei. Kaf/khaf is the only Hebrew letter that can take a vowel in its word-final form, which is pronounced after the consonant, that vowel being the qamatz. Significance of kaph in Hebrew In gematria, kaph represents the number 20. Its final form represents 500, but this is rarely used, tav and qoph (400+100) being used instead. As a prefix, kaph is a preposition: It can mean "like" or "as", as in literary Arabic (see below). In colloquial Hebrew, kaph and shin together have the meaning of "when". This