Ha is the twenty-sixth letter of the modern Arabic order and the fifth of the older abjad order, from which it takes the numeral value five. It has four forms that share almost nothing: a small loop with a rising stroke at the beginning of a word, a figure like a small eight or a knot in the middle, a rounded shape on the line at the end, and a plain circle or teardrop in isolation. Learners are usually taught the four separately.
Ha is a moon letter, so the lam of the definite article is pronounced before it. Its sound is the plain glottal h of English, made with no constriction in the throat, and it is a different letter from the pharyngeal ha that stands sixth in the modern order. English transliteration writes both with h, which is why two quite distinct Arabic letters look the same in roman spellings of names and why scholarly transliteration marks one of them with a dot beneath.
Its name descends from the Northwest Semitic he, the cognate of Hebrew he and Syriac he, whose sense was window, and it holds the numeral value five that Hebrew he holds.
The final form of this letter, marked with two dots above, is ta marbuta, the ending that closes most feminine singular nouns. It is not counted as a twenty-ninth letter and has no numeral value of its own, and it is pronounced as a t or as a light h according to whether the word carries its case ending. Ha is also one of the fourteen letters that appear disjoined at the head of a sura.