Nikud (niqqud) are the small dots and dashes added above, below, and inside Hebrew consonants to mark vowels. The Masoretes devised the system around the 7th to 10th centuries CE to preserve the traditional pronunciation of the Hebrew Bible, which is otherwise written with consonants only.

Which vowel marks does it recognize?

It recognizes the full Tiberian set: sheva, the three hataf reduced vowels, hiriq, tsere, segol, patah, qamatz, holam, qubuts, qamatz qatan, and the dagesh or mappiq point. Each is reported by name with a transliteration and a short description of its quality.

How do I tell qamatz from qamatz qatan?

They share the same long-a sign (a small T-shape under the letter), but qamatz qatan is pronounced as a short o in closed unstressed syllables. Unicode has a separate code point for qamatz qatan, so when a text uses it the tool reports it distinctly; otherwise an ordinary qamatz is shown with both readings noted.

Is the dagesh a vowel?

No. The dagesh is a dot inside a letter marking gemination (doubling) or a plosive pronunciation, and the identical-looking mappiq marks a pronounced final he. The tool lists it because it is a nikud code point, but it is not counted among the vowel points in the summary.

Does my text leave the browser?

No. The analysis reads Unicode combining marks locally in JavaScript. Nothing you paste is uploaded, logged, or stored, so private or unpublished texts stay on your device.

Hebrew Biblical Vowel Pattern Analyzer

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Reading the Masoretic vowel pattern

Biblical Hebrew is written with consonants, and the vowels live in the nikud — the dots and dashes the Masoretes added to fix the pronunciation. This tool reads pointed Hebrew text, identifies every vowel mark, and names it with its transliteration and quality, so you can study the vowel pattern of a word or verse at a glance.

How it works

Hebrew text is a sequence of base consonants (U+05D0 to U+05EA) interleaved with combining vowel marks (mostly U+05B0 to U+05BB, plus qamatz qatan at U+05C7). The tool walks the string code point by code point, separates consonants from marks, and looks up each mark in a table of the Tiberian niqqud:

בְּרֵאשִׁית
  ב + sheva + dagesh
  ר + tsere
  א
  שׁ + hiriq
  י
  ת

Each distinct vowel point is reported once with its count, and the dagesh is flagged separately because it marks gemination rather than a vowel. The summary tallies consonants versus vowel points.

Notes and example

The default text is בְּרֵאשִׁית (bereshit, the first word of Genesis), which shows sheva, tsere, and hiriq together. Note that qamatz and qamatz qatan share a glyph but differ in sound; the tool distinguishes them when the text uses the dedicated qamatz qatan code point. For spelling Hebrew numbers or computing Arabic abjad values, see the related letter-and-number tools.