The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος (alphabētos), was made from the first two letters, alpha (α) and beta (β). The names for … See more

The number of letters in an alphabet can be quite small. The Book Pahlavi script, an abjad, had only twelve letters at one point, and may have had even fewer later on. Today the Rotokas alphabet has only twelve letters. (The Hawaiian alphabet is sometimes claimed … See more

The Phoenician letter names, in which each letter was associated with a word that begins with that sound (acrophony), continue to be used … See more

Ancient Northeast African and Middle Eastern scripts
The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. Egyptian writing had a set of some See more

The term "alphabet" gets used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense. In a larger sense, an alphabet is a … See more

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 … See more

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