Arabic Letter Heh

It is the light Arabic h, unlike the deeper-throat ح.

The wider Semitic alphabetic tradition behind these letters goes back to signs carved at Serabit el-Khadim, a mining site in Sinai, in the early second millennium BCE; each sign's name began with the sound it stood for. Arabic script developed later from Nabataean Aramaic, an older writing system, and a full set of Arabic letter shapes appears by the late fifth century CE. Hebrew ה and Syriac ܗ are relatives from the same tradition.

In dates, the initial form of ه can abbreviate the Hijri era, the Islamic calendar. Unicode 17.0.0 lists this convention.