The Arabic Letter Ghayn (غ): Four Forms, Sound and Words

غ (ghayn) is letter 19 of the 28 in the Arabic alphabet, between ع ʿayn and ف fāʾ. Its sound is a gargled g, like a French r. It joins on both sides, so it has four shapes: غ غ‍ ‍غ‍ ‍غ. It is a moon letter, and its abjad value is 1,000.

Hear its name, غين (ghayn):

Ghayn in all four positions

Ghayn joins to the letter before it and to the letter after it, so its shape depends on where it sits in a word. Alone it is غ. At the start of a word it is غ‍, in the middle ‍غ‍, and at the end ‍غ.

Typed text stores all four shapes as one character, U+063A (ARABIC LETTER GHAIN); the codes in the table, U+FECD to U+FED0, are presentation forms that the Unicode Arabic FAQ does not recommend for regular text.

Ghayn is number 27 of the 28 letters by frequency, 0.3% of all letters, in the 50,000 most common word forms of Arabic film and TV subtitles (hermitdave/FrequencyWords, OpenSubtitles 2018), each form counted as often as it occurs; it is initial in 48%, medial in 46%, final in 4% and alone in 2% of its occurrences.

How to pronounce ghayn

The sound of ghayn is a gargled g, like a French r, written gh in the transliteration of our Arabic alphabet chart. English has no exact match, which puts ghayn among the eleven sounds covered on our Arabic pronunciation guide. Its row from that guide:

In Arabic chat writing, where speakers type Arabic in Latin letters, ghayn is written 3ʼ or gh.

Arabic words with ghayn

These 5 everyday words show ghayn in real writing: it is initial in غرفة, غدا and غريب; medial in مغرب; alone in فارغ. The first three are the practice words printed on its worksheet; the others come from our Arabic flashcards and our Arabic pronunciation guide, and more words by topic are in our Arabic vocabulary lists.

Ghayn with al-, and its number

Ghayn is a moon letter, so the l of al- (the) is pronounced before it: الغرفة is al-ghurfa, the room (test any word in our sun and moon letters checker).

Its abjad value is 1,000 in the common Mashriqi order but 900 in the Maghribi order once used in North Africa and al-Andalus; our abjad calculator adds up whole words in both.

Letters that look like ghayn

Ghayn and ع ʿayn share the same shape, and only the dots tell them apart:

• غ ghayn: one dot above
• ع ʿayn: no dot

English readers see gh and say g. That turns غَرِيب gharīb (strange) into something a Gulf speaker hears as قَرِيب qarīb (near), because Gulf Arabic says qāf as g. Gargle it instead, like the r of French Paris.

Practise writing ghayn

Trace it on the free ghayn tracing worksheet (PDF, one page, 65 KB), which prints its four shapes beside غرفة (ghurfa), مغرب (maghrib) and فارغ (fārigh); the other 27 are on our Arabic writing worksheets page.

Frequently asked questions

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