Ḫāʾ
', ', or Xe, , or ) is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet. It is based on the ' ح. It is related to the Ancient [North Arabian] ?, South Arabian script|South Arabian] ?, and Ge'ez ኀ.
It represents the sound or in Modern Standard Arabic. The pronunciation of خ is very similar to German, Irish, and Polish unpalatalised "ch", Russian х , Greek χ and Peninsular Spanish and Southern Cone "j". In name and shape, it is a variant of. South Semitic also kept the phoneme separate, and it appears as South [Arabian alphabet|South Arabian] Image:himjar kha.PNG|class=skin-invert-image|14px|ḫ, Ge'ez ኀ. Its numerical value is 600. In most European languages, it is mostly romanized as the digraph kh.
When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ח׳.
The most common transliteration in English is "kh", e.g. Khartoum, Sheikh.
' is written is several ways depending on its position in the word:
Ḫā is not related with the letter X, Ḫā has no derivatives.