Ṯāʾ (ث is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet (the others being ḫāʾ, ḏāl, ḍād, ẓāʾ, ġayn). In Modern Standard Arabic it represents the voiceless dental fricative [θ], also found in English as the "th" in words such as "think" and "thin". In name and shape, it is a variant of tāʾ (ت). Its numerical value is 500 (see Abjad numerals).
In contemporary spoken Arabic, pronunciation of ṯāʾ as [θ] is found in the Gulf, Iraqi, Tunisian dialects and in highly-educated pronunciations of Modern Standard and Classical Arabic. Pronunciation of the letter varies between and within the various varieties of Arabic: while it is consistently pronounced as the voiceless dental plosive [t] in Maghrebi Arabic, in the Arabic varieties of the Mashriq (in the broad sense, including Egyptian, Sudanese and Levantine), it can be pronounced as either [t] or as the sibilant voiceless alveolar fricative [s]. Depending on the word in question, words pronounced as [s] are generally more technical or "sophisticated." Regardless of these regional differences, the pattern of the speaker's variety of Arabic frequently intrudes into otherwise Modern Standard speech; this is widely accepted, and is the norm when speaking the mesolect known alternately as lugha wusṭā ("middling/compromise language") or ʿAmmiyyat/Dārijat al-Muṯaqqafīn ("Educated/Cultured Colloquial") used in the informal speech of educated Arabs of different countries.
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