Hebrew punctuation

 ( Hebrew Alphabet ) 

Hebrew punctuation is similar to that of English language and other Western world languages, Modern Hebrew having imported additional punctuation marks from these languages in order to avoid the ambiguities sometimes occasioned by the relative lack of such symbols in Biblical Hebrew.

With most printed Hebrew texts from the early 1970s and before, opening quotation marks are low (as in German language), and closing ones are high, often going above the letters themselves (as opposed to the gershayim, which is level with the top of letters). An example of this system is .

However, this distinction in Hebrew between opening and closing quotation marks has mostly disappeared, and today, quotations are most often punctuated as they are in English (such as ), with both quotation marks high. This is due to the advent of the Hebrew keyboard, which lacks the opening quotation mark 〈„⟩, as well as to the lack in Hebrew of “smart quotes” in certain word processing programs.

In addition, the quotation mark is often used for the similar looking but different gershayim mark ⟨〉, as that too is absent from the Hebrew keyboard.

A Hebrew period in a traditional serif face usually has defined corners (similar to a geometric shapes). This is also true for other dots in punctuation, such as in the question mark and exclamation mark.

In Arabic language, which is also written from right to left, the question mark 〈〉 is mirrored right-to-left from the Latin question mark. (Some browsers may display the character in the previous sentence as a forward question mark due to font or text directionality issues.) Hebrew language is also written right-to-left, but uses a question mark that appears on the page in the same orientation as Latin 〈?〉.Truss, Lynne. Eats, Shoots & Leaves, 2003. p. 143. . Note that Hebrew commas are mirrored – although that was proposed in the 19th century (together with mirrored semi-colons, , etc.) by a British minister, William Withers Ewbank.

The paseq () 〈〉 originates from Biblical Hebrew. As it is not on a standard Hebrew keyboard, a vertical bar 〈|〉 is often used instead. However, it is seldom if ever used in modern Israeli Hebrew, and is not mentioned on the Academy of the Hebrew Language's guide to modern Hebrew punctuation. The height of the paseq depends on the font, but it is generally the same as the letter .

Like much Biblical Hebrew punctuation, the meaning of the paseq is not known, although a number of hypotheses exist. The word itself means "separator", but this name was a medieval innovation by later Jews; the root does not exist in the Biblical Hebrew canon. James Kennedy, an English hebraist, wrote a book about the paseq in which he hypothesized that it was an ancient mark serving the same purpose as the modern word sic (in non-Latin texts). The Westminster Leningrad Codex contains over 500 paseqs; William Wickes, an influential scholar in this area, divide them into nine classes; Wilhelm Gesenius, drawing on Wickes, divided them into five:

• as a divider between two words which end and begin with the same letters, e.g. ( Shalom, ma)
• between identical or very similar words, e.g. רַקדָן׀ רָקַד (the dancer danced)
• between words which are to a high degree contradictory, e.g. אֱלֹהִים׀ רֶשַׁע (Omnibenevolence)
• between words otherwise liable to be wrongly connected, e.g. כַּף׀ תּוֹר, which prevents the somewhat bizarre phrase כַּף (, spoon) תּוֹר (, Queue area) from being wrongly read as כַּפְתּוֹר (), meaning button.
• "and lastly, between heterogeneous terms, as Eleazar the High Priest, and Joshua" (אֶלְעָזָ֣ר הַכֹּהֵ֣ן׀ וִיהוֹשֻׁ֪עַsee context in )

An example may be found in in the Westminster Leningrad Codex and many other manuscripts:

The original purpose of the maqaf was to show that two words should be considered one for the purpose of dagesh placement, vowels, stress ( ṭaʿam, ), and cantillation. This use continues into the present beyond reprintings of Biblical texts; for example, the sheet music for modern Hebrew songs is normally printed with them. The maqaf is well-used in Hebrew typography; most books and newspapers use it and have the hyphens higher than one would find in English. In typed documents, however, it is frequently not used because before the 2010s it was absent from most keyboards or cumbersome to type. As a consequence, the common hyphen 〈-〉 is most often used in online writings. This situation can be compared to that of users writing in Latin alphabets using the easily available hyphen-minus 〈-〉 over hyphen 〈‐〉, minus sign 〈−〉, en dash 〈–〉, and em dash 〈—〉. As of the 2010s, it is possible to insert the maqaf ⟨־⟩ using most common computer and mobile phone operating systems.

Unlike the dollar sign, the new shekel sign is not used that often when handwriting monetary amounts, and is generally replaced by the abbreviation (standing for sheqel ẖadash, lit. "new shekel"). The new shekel sign can be typed on desktop Linux and Windows 8 and higher systems using the combination AltGr-4 according to the SI 1452 standard.

The short-lived Israeli old shekel, on the other hand, which had the symbol ,As of December 2024, this symbol does not exist in Unicode. is rarely referred to in Israeli texts; both due to its lifespan of only five years and the fact that due to hyperinflation it lost value daily, so that referring to a value in Israeli old shekels, even in retrospective writing, is essentially meaningless without knowing the exact time the figure was quoted. As prices changed so rapidly, advertising of the time predominately used dollars; when the shekel was referred to at all, it was with the letter S or its full Hebrew name—; although certain banks, such as Bank Leumi, used the letter to refer to it on checks, as well as the Latin letters "I.S."

The Israeli pound was the Israeli currency until 1980. Its sign is I£, and its abbreviation is .

The geresh 〈〉, is the Hebrew equivalent of a period in abbreviations (e.g. abbrev.), in addition to being attached to Hebrew letters to indicate sounds like soft g and ch in foreign names such as Charles () and Jake (). The gershayim 〈〉, is a Hebrew symbol indicating that a sequence of characters is an acronym, and is placed before the last character of the word. Owing to a Hebrew keyboard's having neither a geresh nor gershayim, they are usually replaced online with, respectively, the visually similar apostrophe 〈'〉 and quotation mark 〈"⟩. The quotation mark and apostrophe are higher than the geresh and gershayim: where the latter are placed level with the top of Hebrew letters, the apostrophe and quotation marks are above them.

Some Hebrew-specific (fonts designed primarily for Hebrew letters), such as David, Narkisim and FrankRuehl, do not feature the apostrophe and quotation marks as such but use the geresh and gershayim to substitute for them.