It is the eighth letter of the Mandaic alphabet and stands where Aramaic, Hebrew and Syriac all have heth. It joins only to the right, so the letter after it begins a new connected group.
The modern character standard describes it as a pharyngeal, a sound made by narrowing the throat, though the gutturals weakened in Mandaic and the letter's reading in the spoken language has moved a long way from its classical value. That gap between the description and the reading is ordinary in a liturgical language and is not a defect in either.
Its name breaks the alphabet's usual pattern of a plus the sound, as do ushenna, aksa, in, dushenna and kad. Those irregular names are among the clearest signs that the Mandaic alphabet is not the Aramaic one relabelled.
It holds the eighth place in an order the first twenty-two Mandaic letters keep unchanged, so its counterparts are Syriac heth, Hebrew cheth and the Arabic letter at eight in the abjad reckoning. In Hebrew and Syriac that letter carries the numeral value eight; Mandaic records no numeral use for its letters, so the correspondence stops at the place in the sequence.
Because it joins only to the right, a word containing it is broken into more than one connected run. The letters that behave this way are halqa, az, it, aksa and ash, together with the three signs that close the alphabet, and those breaks are what keep a line of joined writing from reading as one continuous stroke.