YOHDH

or, as commonly anglicized, yodh [י]. The tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, later also used, outside the Hebrew Scriptures, to represent the number ten.

Yohdh is equivalent to the English “y,” at the beginning of a syllable. Otherwise, it usually corresponds to the English letter “i.” It is the smallest of the Hebrew letters. The name of the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet, i·oʹta, evidently is akin to the Hebrew yohdh. Since the law of Moses was originally written and subsequently preserved in Hebrew, it is likely that Jesus was referring back to the Hebrew yohdh when he said that “the smallest letter [Gr., i·oʹta]” would not pass away without its due fulfillment. (Matt. 5:18) This letter occurs as the initial letter in the Tetragrammaton or sacred name Jehovah (reading from right to left: יהוה)and as such was carried over into the earliest copies of the Greek Septuagint Version. A papyrus fragment of the third century C.E. (P. Oxyrhynchus vii. 1007) containing a portion of the Septuagint translation of Genesis abbreviates the Tetragrammaton by having its first letter doubled, a doubled yohdh.

Due to the similarity between the letters yohdh (י) and waw (ו), they were sometimes confused by copyists. In the Hebrew, at Psalm 119:73-80 each verse begins with the letter yohdh.