Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The seventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The seventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet, corresponding to the English z. Its numerical value is 7.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The seventh letter of many Semitic alphabets (
Phoenician ,Aramaic ,Hebrew ,Syriac ,Arabic and others).
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the 7th letter of the Hebrew alphabet
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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For what it’s worth, my wife reiterates her point that “neshek,” not zayin, is the Hebrew word for “weapon,” and adds that it’s very, very rare to hear any of the other terms the reader mentions in modern Hebrew.
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For a moment, he watches them rise and fall, gently, with her breathing. kaf zayin
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For a brief introduction and a glossary of Hebrew and Aramaic words, see the first installment. yod zayin
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She waits patiently, smiling, encouraging; but her smile is dimming, her limbs growing cold, her breath thin, quick -- mem zayin
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She rests it there, as if warming herself on a cook-pot. tet zayin
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May 3, 2007 at 3:53 am elfinugget, ai noze whut u meen. doze restrawntz whut letz u driiiiive into demz r teh shizzle! taeks dubble + willpowrz to drive past n all u heerz is frenchifriz zayin, nooo! do not drive past! iz hard wrk!
I’M STUFFED… - Lolcats 'n' Funny Pictures of Cats - I Can Has Cheezburger? 2007
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Zion actually means a “designated area or sign post,” which sounds similar to zayin, which means a weapon or penis, according to Rabbi Charles Sheer, the former Jewish chaplain at Columbia.
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One of the assigned readings by Israeli scholar and feminist Simona Sharoni spoke of how in Hebrew the word “zayin” means both penis and weapon in a discussion of Israeli militarised masculinity.
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The derivation I heard was that in early Israeli slang the word zanav, ‘tail’, was used for penis, and when that started to seem too improper, the first letter of the word, zayin, was euphemistically substituted for it, which in due course has become the only colloquial word for it (with no trace of this sense remaining inzanav).
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Anyone who confuses zayin and tziyoan to make a silly political point is aboob.
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