Teth, also written asṬēth orTet, is the ninthletter of theSemitic abjads, includingPhoenicianṭēt 𐤈,Hebrew,Aramaicṭēṯ 𐡈, andSyriacṭēṯ ܛ, andArabicṭāʾط‎. It is also related to theAncient North Arabian 𐪗‎‎‎,South Arabian𐩷, andGeʽezጠ.

The Phoenician letter also gave rise to theGreektheta (Θ), originally anaspiratedvoiceless dental stop but now used for thevoiceless dental fricative. The Arabic letter (ط) is sometimes transliterated asTah in English,^[1] for example inArabic script in Unicode.

The sound value of Teth is/tˤ/, one of the Semiticemphatic consonants.

The Phoenician letter nameṭēth may mean "spinning wheel"^[2] pictured as (compare Hebrew rootט-ו-י‎ (ṭ-w-y) meaning 'spinning' (a thread) whichbegins with Teth). According to another hypothesis (Brian Colless^{[citation needed]}), the letter possibly continues aMiddle Bronze Age glyph namedṭab 'good', Aramaicטַב‎ 'tav', Hebrewטוב‎ 'tov', Syriac ܛܒܐ 'tava', modern Arabicطَيّب 'ṭayyib', all of identical meaning.

Jewish religious books about the "holy letters" from the 10th century onward discuss the connection or origin of the letter Teth with the wordtov "good". This is alluded to in a cryptic aggadata in the Talmud Baba Kamma 54b. Additionally the first time the letter "tes" appears in the Torah is in the word "Tov" meaning "good."This was especially emphasized ever since the late 1600s after theBaal Shem Tov became influential, since the letter Teth was in his Acronym standing for Tov, and goodness was part of his philosophy.Theacrostic poems of the Bible use 'Tov' to represent the letter (e.g. Psalm 119:65-72).

The letter is namedṭāʾ طَاءْ;Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation:/tˤ/.

It has four forms, and the letter does not change its shape depending on its position in the word:

Orthographic variants
Serif	sans-Serif	Monospaced	Cursive Hebrew	Rashi script
ט	ט	ט

The Hebrew spelling of name of the letter:טֵית‎

InModern Hebrew, Tet represents avoiceless alveolar plosive/t/, and is therefore usually homophonic with theabjad's final letter, Tavת‎. However, Tet can bepharyngealized to produce[tˤ] in traditionalTemani andSephardi pronunciation. [tˤ] is also probably the pronunciation in Biblical Hebrew.

Ingematria, Tet represents the number nine. When followed by an apostrophe, it means 9,000. The most common example of this usage is in the numbers of theHebrew years (e.g.,ט'תשנד‎ innumbers would be thedate 9754).

As well, in gematria, the number 15 is written with Tet andVav, (9+6) to avoid the normal constructionYud andHei (10+5) which spells aname of God. Similarly, 16 is written with Tet andZayin (9+7) instead ofYud andVav (10+6) to avoid spelling part of theTetragrammaton.

Tet is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns (calledtagin) when written in aSefer Torah. SeeShin,Ayin,Gimmel,Nun,Zayin, andTzadi.

A symbol similar to the Phoenician teth is used for thetensor product, as${\displaystyle \otimes }$, but this is presumably an independent development, by modification of themultiplication sign ×. The Hebrewט‎ is also visually similar to the letterƲ.

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