Definition of Tsade

Tsade (also spelled or Tzadi or Sadhe or Tzaddik) is the eighteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew  and Arabic alphabet  . Its oldest sound value is probably , although there is a variety of pronunciation in different modern Semitic languages and their dialects. It represents the coalescence of three Proto-Semitic "emphatic consonants" in Canaanite. Arabic, which kept the phonemes separate, introduced variants of and to express the three (see , ). In Aramaic, these emphatic consonants coalesced instead with and , respectively, thus Hebrew ארץ (earth) is ארעא in Aramaic.