Dhal is the ninth letter of the modern Arabic order, written as the small dal hook carrying a single dot above it. Like dal it joins only to the right, so it ends the connected group it stands in and the following letter begins a new one. Its sound is the voiced dental fricative heard at the start of the English word this, the voiced partner of the sound written by tha. Both are consonants that Arabic preserved where several related languages lost them, and both have merged with other sounds in many spoken dialects while remaining distinct in formal reading and recitation.
Dhal is a sun letter, so the lam of the definite article assimilates to it in speech.
The letter is one of the six rawadif, the six consonants Arabic added to the twenty-two letter sequence it inherited from the older Northwest Semitic alphabets. Its placement records that history exactly. In the modern order, which arranges letters by written shape, dhal stands next to the dal it is built from. In the older abjad order it is not among the twenty-two at all but among the six appended after them, where it carries the numeral value seven hundred. Having no inherited letter behind it, dhal has no Northwest Semitic name, no cognate in the Hebrew, Syriac or Samaritan alphabets whose name can be set beside it, and no reconstructed pictographic sense.