Hebrew Niqqud & Punctuation Cheatsheet

Hebrew is written with consonants, and the vowels are supplied by a system of dots and dashes called niqqud, placed mostly below the letters. Everyday Hebrew — newspapers, websites, novels, street signs — omits niqqud entirely, and fluent readers supply the vowels from context. You will encounter it in four places: children's books, poetry, dictionaries and learner materials, and religious texts, especially the Bible and prayer books, where the vocalisation is fixed by tradition and must be reproduced exactly.

The marks in the table cover the main vowel signs. Kamatz and patach both give an a sound in modern Israeli pronunciation; segol and tzere give e; chirik gives i; cholam gives o; kubutz gives u. The sheva marks either a very short vowel or no vowel at all depending on position. The three reduced vowels — chataf patach, chataf segol and chataf kamatz — are half-vowels used under guttural consonants. Modern Israeli Hebrew has merged several distinctions that these marks originally separated, so the writing system preserves more contrast than the current spoken language uses.

The dagesh, a single dot inside a letter, is the one non-vowel mark here and it does two different jobs. In the letters bet, kaf and pe it changes the consonant outright: with a dagesh they are b, k and p; without it they are v, kh and f. In other letters it historically marked doubling. This is why the same written letter can be read two ways and why the dot matters even in otherwise unvocalised text where writers sometimes keep it for clarity.

The last four entries are punctuation rather than vocalisation, and they are commonly confused with Latin lookalikes. The geresh ׳ and gershayim ״ are Hebrew marks used for abbreviations, acronyms and transliterated sounds — they are not an apostrophe and a double quote, though they look similar and are constantly substituted for them. The maqaf ־ is the Hebrew hyphen and sits higher than a Latin hyphen. The sof pasuq ׃ ends a verse in biblical text. Using the Latin equivalents is common but technically incorrect, and it affects search and text processing.

On Windows, niqqud is entered on the standard Hebrew layout by holding CapsLock or Shift with the number keys, though the exact mapping varies by layout version; the Hebrew Standard layout added a more consistent arrangement. Alt codes are impractical for these marks. On macOS, select the Hebrew input source and use Option plus the relevant key, or switch to the Hebrew-QWERTY source for a more predictable arrangement. On Linux, the Hebrew layout with the lyx or biblical variant exposes the full set. Bear in mind that niqqud are combining characters: they are typed after the consonant they belong to and attach to it, so the visual order and the storage order are not the same, which is normal and not a bug.