The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος (alphabētos). The Greek word was made from the first two letters, alpha(α)

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Ancient Northeast African and Middle Eastern scripts
The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. Egyptian

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The term "alphabet" is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense. In the wider sense, an alphabet is a script that is segmental at the phonemelevel—that is, it has separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or

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Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters, which can then be used for purposes of collation—namely for the listing of words and other items in what is called alphabetical order.
The basic ordering of the

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When an alphabet is adopted or developed to represent a given language, an orthography generally comes into being, providing rules for the spellingof words in that language. In accordance with the principle on which alphabets are based, these rules will generally

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• A Is For Aardvark
• Abecedarium
• Acrophony
• Akshara
• Alphabet book
• Alphabet effect

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The Phoenician letter names, in which each letter was associated with a word that begins with that sound (acrophony), continue to be used to varying degrees in Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic.
The names were

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