Az is the seventh letter of the Mandaic alphabet and writes z, a voiced alveolar sibilant. It joins only to the right, so the letter that follows it begins a new connected group.
Its name follows the alphabet's usual pattern of naming a letter by its sound with a preceding a, and carries no separate sense; the weapon behind Syriac zain and Hebrew zayin has no counterpart in the Mandaic name.
The seventh place is the place z holds in Hebrew, in Syriac and in the older Aramaic sequence, because the first twenty-two Mandaic letters keep the inherited Aramaic order exactly. Only the signs added at the end of the alphabet depart from it.
Only the letters that join on both sides take a full set of four shapes. Az, joining on one side, has fewer, and the difference is visible on any page of Mandaic writing: after an az the pen lifts and the next letter starts a fresh run. Mandaic shares this behaviour with Syriac and Arabic, which each have their own list of letters that join only to the right, and the lists are similar without being identical. Comparing them is one of the few places where the kinship of these scripts shows in how they are written rather than in what order the letters come.