The Arabic Letter Jīm (ج): Four Forms, Sound and Words

ج (jīm) is letter 5 of the 28 in the Arabic alphabet, between ث thāʾ and ح ḥāʾ. Its sound is j, as in jam. It joins on both sides, so it has four shapes: ج ج‍ ‍ج‍ ‍ج. It is a moon letter, and its abjad value is 3.

Hear its name, جيم (jīm):

Jīm in all four positions

Jīm 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 ج. At the start of a word it is ج‍, in the middle ‍ج‍, and at the end ‍ج.

Typed text stores all four shapes as one character, U+062C (ARABIC LETTER JEEM); the codes in the table, U+FE9D to U+FEA0, are presentation forms that the Unicode Arabic FAQ does not recommend for regular text.

Jīm is number 19 of the 28 letters by frequency, 1.5% 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 59%, medial in 32%, final in 2% and alone in 7% of its occurrences.

How to pronounce jīm

The sound of jīm is j, as in jam, written j in the transliteration of our Arabic alphabet chart. The chart's note on it reads: like "j" in "jam"; hard "g" in Egypt.

Spoken dialects do not all say jīm the same way. Learn the Standard sound first, because every speaker recognises it; this is what you will hear instead.

Arabic words with jīm

These 5 everyday words show jīm in real writing: it is initial in جمل, رجل, جدة and جميل; final in ثلج. The first three are the practice words printed on its worksheet; the others come from our list of Arabic family words and our Arabic pronunciation guide, and more words by topic are in our Arabic vocabulary lists.

Jīm with al-, and its number

Jīm is a moon letter, so the l of al- (the) is pronounced before it: الجمل is al-jamal, the camel (test any word in our sun and moon letters checker).

Its abjad value is 3 in both the Mashriqi and the Maghribi order; our abjad calculator adds up whole words. Jīm is also one of the five qalqalah letters of Quran recitation, ق ط ب ج د: when its vowel is cancelled, by a sukūn or by stopping on it at the end of a sentence, reciters give it a slight bounce, as the Wikipedia article on tajweed describes. Our tajweed rules chart marks it in colour.

Letters that look like jīm

Jīm, ح ḥāʾ and خ khāʾ share the same belly, and only the dots tell them apart:

• ج jīm: a dot inside
• ح ḥāʾ: no dot
• خ khāʾ: one dot above

In its isolated and final shapes jīm's dot sits inside the curve of its belly; at the start and in the middle of a word, where only the top stroke is left, the dot sits just under it. Look for that one dot below: it is what separates jīm from ḥāʾ and khāʾ in every position.

Practise writing jīm

Trace it on the free jīm tracing worksheet (PDF, one page, 64 KB), which prints its four shapes beside جمل (jamal), رجل (rajul) and ثلج (thalj); the other 27 are on our Arabic writing worksheets page.

Frequently asked questions

Keep learning Arabic

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