Ha is the sixth letter of the modern Arabic order and the eighth of the older abjad order, from which it takes the numeral value eight. It is the undotted member of the jim, ha and kha group, written as a hook running down into a bowl that falls below the line. It joins on both sides, and reduces in initial and medial position to a small triangular head resting on the line. It is a moon letter, so the lam of the definite article is pronounced before it.
Its sound is a voiceless pharyngeal fricative, produced by narrowing the throat well below where any European language places a consonant. It has no equivalent in English, French or German, and learners are usually taught it by contrast with the plain glottal ha that stands twenty-sixth in the modern order. The two are entirely different letters that happen to be transcribed with the same roman letter, which is why scholarly transliteration marks one of them with a dot beneath.
The name descends from the Northwest Semitic cheth and the letter is the cognate of Hebrew chet, Syriac heth and Samaritan it, whose sense was reconstructed as a fence or an enclosure. That reconstruction belongs to the older linear script rather than to Arabic, and Arabic carries the name without the meaning. Ha stands among the fourteen letters that appear in disjoined form at the head of certain suras of the Quran, where it opens a group of seven suras beginning with ha and mim.