Final form

For approaches that focus on the final form of the biblical text, see Canonical criticism.

In many languages, the final form is a special character used to represent a letter only when it occurs at the end of a word. For example, in Hebrew alphabet the final form is called sofit (Hebrew: סופית‎, meaning in this case "final" or "ending"). The following Hebrew letters

kaf כ, mem מ, nun נ, pe פ, and tsadi צ

have the final forms

kaf sofit ך, mem sofit ם, nun sofit ן, pe sofit ף, and tsadi sofit ץ.

Some languages that use final form characters are:

• Arabic
• Hebrew
• Manchu
• Greek

The lowercase Latin letter "s" had separate medial (ſ) and final (s) in the orthographies of many European languages from the medieval period to the early 19th century; it survived in the German Fraktur script until the 1940s.