Hebrew Letter Tsadi

It represents a consonant, not a word or reaction. The modern Israeli pronunciation is like the “ts” in English “cats.” Add the small Hebrew mark called geresh to make צ׳, which spells “ch” as in English “chair” in borrowed words.

The letter evolved alongside Hebrew writing

Its history belongs to an alphabetic tradition developed to write consonants by West Semitic speakers in the early second millennium BCE. A pottery fragment from Izbet Sartah preserves an alphabet from an eleventh-century BCE context, before a distinct Hebrew script.

Jewish writing later shifted from Paleo-Hebrew, the older Hebrew script, to the Aramaic-derived “square” script familiar in Hebrew print. That script is attested from the 5th century BCE; this dates the script tradition, not today's exact glyph. Phoenician Sade is an older relative of tsadi, and Arabic ṣād is a related letter.