Yudh is the tenth letter of the Syriac abjad and the last of the units, with the numeral value ten. It writes the consonant y, and like waw it also carries long vowels, standing for i and e where the pointing directs. It joins on both sides.
Yudh is the smallest sign in every Syriac hand, often little more than a tick sitting on the line. Its size is a practical problem as well as a description: in a cursive hand a yudh can be lost in the join between two other letters, and reading a crowded manuscript involves deciding how many of them are actually there. Its name is the inherited Northwest Semitic word for a hand.
A ligature of yudh and he is recorded as a single sign of its own, used mostly in East Syriac texts. Like the Garshuni variants and the positional forms, it is a scribal ligature rather than a twenty-third letter, and the alphabet is still counted at twenty-two. This is the general rule for Syriac: the character standard encodes far more signs than the alphabet has letters, and almost all of the excess is ligatures, positional variants and borrowings made for other languages.
The entry here is for the letter of the abjad, which Estrangela, Serto and Madnhaya all write, each in its own drawing.