Gershayim

Gershayim is a punctuation mark used in the Hebrew language. It has two distinct meanings.
# The original meaning of "Gershayim" is to denote a note of cantillation in the reading of the Torah, taking the form of a doubled curved stroke printed above the accented letter.
#The name is now often applied to a double apostrophe (״) used to denote acronyms. This is written between the second-last and last letters of the non-inflected form of the acronym [cite web|title=Academy of the Hebrew Language|url=http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/decision5.html Hebrew Punctuation ] , e.g. "report", singular: "דּוּ״חַ" (which stands for "דין וחשבון"); plural: "דּוּ״חוֹת"; or "squad commander", masculine: מ״כ (which stands for "מפקד כיתה"); feminine: "מַ״כִּית".

Gershayim are sometimes also used in the same typographical manner to indicate that the sequence of letters represents a number rather than a word. This is used in the case where a number is represented by two or more Hebrew numerals ("e.g.," 18 → ‫י״ח‬).

In older texts it is sometimes used to denote the transliteration of a foreign word, and is placed between the last and the penultimate letter: this function corresponds to the use of italics.

Computer encoding

Since most keyboards do not have a gershayim key, often people will substitute a quotation mark.

ee also

*Geresh
*Hebrew alphabet
*Hebrew numerals

References