<modern HebrewṢHL (read as ṣahal), acronym < the initial letters of Ṣĕḇā Hăgannāh Lĕ-Yiśrāēl Israel Defence Force <ṣāḇā army, host (see Sabaothn.) + hăgannāh defence (see Haganahn.) + lĕ to + YiśrāēlIsraeln.
Meaning & use
1959–
The name applied by the Israelis to their defence forces, formed originally in 1948 by the fusion of pre-independence military organizations.
1959
The Haganah disbanded, the Irgunist and the Sternist forces and their members were fused into the Zahal, made up of the initial Hebrew letters of Zva Haganah L'Israel—Israel's National Army.
A. M. Heller, Israel's Odyssey 61
1969
Zahal's chief of staff was delegated the operational function of maintaining and training the army.
A. Perlmutter, Military & Politics in Israel v. 55
1971
Very few top-ranking Israeli officers gave their Zahal (Defence Force) more than one chance in three of pulling it off.
Scope (South Africa) 19 March 17/3
1975
The twins did not have to lose two years to the Zahal, as the [Israeli] army does not draft religious girls.
C. A. Haddad, Moroccan i. 7
1982
The leadership opted for a unified command for Zahal in which there would be one general headquarters and a chief of staff.
Murray & Viotti, Defense Policies of Nations ix. 378
Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛtl/ but /ˈpɛtl̩i/.
Vowels
iːfleece
ihappy
ɪkit
ɛdress
atrap, bath
ɑːstart, palm, bath
ɒlot
ɔːthought, force
ʌstrut
ʊfoot
uːgoose
əletter
əːnurse
ɪənear
ɛːsquare
ʊəcure
eɪface
ʌɪpride
aʊmouth
əʊgoat
ɔɪvoice
ãgratin
ɒ̃salon
ᵻ(/ɪ/-/ə/)
ᵿ(/ʊ/-/ə/)
Other symbols
The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress.
The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress.
Round brackets ( ) in a transcription indicate that the symbol within the brackets is optional.
Zahal typically occurs about 0.03 times per million words in modern written English.
Zahal is in frequency band 3, which contains words occurring between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of Zahal, n., 1950–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1950
0.044
1960
0.039
1970
0.034
1980
0.031
1990
0.036
2000
0.028
2010
0.018
Zahal, n. was first published in 1986; not fully revised.