The Arabic Letter Ṣād (ص): Four Forms, Sound and Words

ص (ṣād) is letter 14 of the 28 in the Arabic alphabet, between ش shīn and ض ḍād. Its sound is a heavy s, said with the tongue pulled back. It joins on both sides, so it has four shapes: ص ص‍ ‍ص‍ ‍ص. It is a sun letter, and its abjad value is 90.

Hear its name, صاد (ṣād):

Ṣād in all four positions

Ṣād 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 ص. At the start of a word it is ص‍, in the middle ‍ص‍, and at the end ‍ص.

Typed text stores all four shapes as one character, U+0635 (ARABIC LETTER SAD); the codes in the table, U+FEB9 to U+FEBC, are presentation forms that the Unicode Arabic FAQ does not recommend for regular text.

Ṣād is number 23 of the 28 letters by frequency, 0.8% 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 39%, medial in 48%, final in 9% and alone in 4% of its occurrences.

How to pronounce ṣād

The sound of ṣād is a heavy s, said with the tongue pulled back, written ṣ in the transliteration of our Arabic alphabet chart. The chart's note on it reads: emphatic "s"; tongue flat, sound deepens. English has no exact match, which puts ṣād 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, ṣād is written 9.

Arabic words with ṣād

These 5 everyday words show ṣād in real writing: it is initial in صديق, صيف and صوم; medial in قصر; final in قميص. The first three are the practice words printed on its worksheet; the others come from other letters' worksheets and our page of Islamic phrases in Arabic, and more words by topic are in our Arabic vocabulary lists.

Ṣād with al-, and its number

Ṣād is a sun letter, so the l of al- (the) goes silent before it: الصديق is said aṣ-ṣadīq, the friend (test any word in our sun and moon letters checker).

Its abjad value is 90 in the common Mashriqi order but 60 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 ṣād

Ṣād and ض ḍād share the same loop, and only the dots tell them apart:

• ص ṣād: no dot
• ض ḍād: one dot above

The emphatic letters darken the vowels next to them, and most English speakers hear that vowel before they hear the consonant. Practise ṣād in pairs: سَيْف sayf (sword) with a bright a, then صَيْف ṣayf (summer) with the tongue pulled back and a darker, rounder vowel.

Practise writing ṣād

Trace it on the free ṣād tracing worksheet (PDF, one page, 66 KB), which prints its four shapes beside صديق (ṣadīq), قصر (qaṣr) and قميص (qamīṣ); the other 27 are on our Arabic writing worksheets page.

Words and names that start with ṣād: Sophia in Arabic.

Frequently asked questions

Keep learning Arabic

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