Hebrew has five letters whose shape depends on position: they take a special final (sofit) form at the end of a word and a regular form everywhere else. This tool detects and corrects letters written in the wrong form for their position.
How it works
The normaliser scans each letter, decides whether it stands at the end of a word, and applies the placement rule:
final forms: ך ם ן ף ץ (kaf mem nun pe tsadi)
regular forms: כ מ נ פ צ
rule: letter at word end -> final form
letter not at word end -> regular form
word boundary = any non-Hebrew-letter character (space, punctuation, digit)A letter is “at word end” when the next base Hebrew letter does not exist or a non-letter follows. Niqqud (vowel points) and cantillation marks are counted as belonging to the current word, so a vocalised word-final letter is still recognised correctly.
Why final-form errors occur
Final-form errors arise in several common scenarios:
- Keyboard input without a Hebrew-aware layout: Some users typing Hebrew on a phone or a keyboard without dedicated sofit keys produce the regular form in every position because the sofit keys are less accessible.
- OCR of printed Hebrew: Optical character recognition software trained on secular modern Hebrew fonts may confuse the visually similar pairs — kaf/final-kaf, mem/final-mem — depending on image quality or font style.
- Copy-paste from sources with encoding issues: Some legacy Hebrew encodings represent the sofit letters with different code points, and a lossy round-trip through an encoding conversion can drop or swap them.
- Programmatic text generation: Code that builds Hebrew strings by concatenating root letters without positional awareness will produce the non-sofit form even at the end of a word.
- Acronyms and abbreviations: In Hebrew acronyms (ראשי תיבות), some writers deliberately place a non-final letter at the end to signal that it is an abbreviation rather than a word. This tool lists all changes rather than silently hiding them, so you can review and revert those cases.
The five sofit pairs
| Letter | Regular | Final (sofit) |
|---|---|---|
| Kaf | כ | ך |
| Mem | מ | ם |
| Nun | נ | ן |
| Pe | פ | ף |
| Tsadi | צ | ץ |
Example
שלומ is corrected to שלום because a word-final mem must be the sofit form ם, and a stray ך inside a word would be changed back to כ. This is the typical clean-up needed when text has been typed without final-form awareness or copied from a source that lost the distinction. Review the change list before copying, since proper nouns and acronyms occasionally use forms deliberately.