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Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word alphabet is a compound of alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet.
Letter frequency is the number of times letters of the alphabet appear on average in written language. Letter frequency analysis dates back to the Arab mathematician Al-Kindi (c. AD 801–873), who formally developed the method to break ciphers .
The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος alphábētos; it was made from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha (α) and beta (β). [19]
The American manual alphabet, an example of letters in fingerspelling. Before alphabets, phonograms, graphic symbols of sounds, were used.There were three kinds of phonograms: verbal, pictures for entire words, syllabic, which stood for articulations of words, and alphabetic, which represented signs or letters.
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, [1] [2] used in the modern English alphabet, and others worldwide. Its name in English is a (pronounced / ˈ eɪ / AY), plural aes. [nb 1] [2] It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. [3]
A spelling alphabet (also called by various other names) is a set of words used to represent the letters of an alphabet in oral communication, especially over a two-way radio or telephone. The words chosen to represent the letters sound sufficiently different from each other to clearly differentiate them.
The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet. [note 7] For this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ʔ , originally had the form of a question mark with the dot removed.
The letter o is the fourth most common letter in the English alphabet. [4] Like the other English vowel letters, it has associated "long" and "short" pronunciations. The "long" o as in boat is actually most often a diphthong / oʊ / (realized dialectically anywhere from [o] to [əʊ]). In English, there is also a "short" o as in fox, / ɒ ...