Other forms: alphabets
The alphabet is all the letters of a language in their fixed order. A to Z, and everybody learns it as a song.
English has twenty-six, Russian has thirty-three, and Hawaiian has thirteen. The order matters enormously, since dictionaries, indexes and filing all depend on it, which is what alphabetical means. The name comes from alpha and beta, the first two Greek letters. There is also the phonetic alphabet used over the radio, where alpha, bravo and charlie stand in for letters that sound alike.
1nounalphabetThe set of letters used to write a language, in their conventional order.
“She could recite the alphabet backwards.”
The alphabet is named after its first two letters, alpha and beta, and those are named after an ox and a house: the Phoenician words whose shapes the letters began as.
la-cla
alphabētum
Middle English
alphabete
English, today
alphabet
Built from
From Middle English alphabete, from la-cla alphabētum. From Middle English alphabete, borrowed from la-cla alphabētum, from Ancient Greek ἀλφάβητος, from ἄλφα and βῆτα, the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, Α and Β, lowercase forms α and β. The Greek names derived from aleph, the name of the phn - letter 𐤀 (“ox”) and beth, the name of the letter 𐤁 (“house”), so called because they were pictograms of those objects, having developed from the Egyptian hieroglyphs F1 (𓃾) and pr (𓉐). a doublet of alfabeto. Dipslaced native Old English stæfrǣw (literally "staff-row").
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA