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A spelling alphabet is also often called a phonetic alphabet, especially by amateur radio enthusiasts, [1] recreational sailors in the US and Australia, [2] and NATO military organizations, [3] despite this usage of the term producing a naming collision with the usage of the same phrase in phonetics to mean a notation used for phonetic ...
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. Old English was first written down using the Latin alphabet during the 7th century. During the ...
Letters are associated with specific names, which may differ between languages and dialects. Z, for example, is usually called zed outside of the United States, where it is named zee. Both ultimately derive from the name of the parent Greek letter zeta Ζ . In alphabets, letters are arranged in alphabetical order, which also may vary by language.
A language may spell some words with unpronounced letters that exist for historical or other reasons. For example, the spelling of the Thai word for 'beer' เบียร์ retains a letter for the final consonant /r/ present in the English word it borrows, but silences it. [91]
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 15 February 2025. Letter names for unambiguous communication Not to be confused with International Phonetic Alphabet. Alphabetic code words A lfa N ovember B ravo O scar C harlie P apa D elta Q uebec E cho R omeo F oxtrot S ierra G olf T ango H otel U niform I ndia V ictor J uliett W hiskey K ilo X ray L ...
There are several reasons for this, including: first, the alphabet has 26 letters, but the English language has 40 sounds that must be reflected in word spellings; second, English spelling began to be standardized in the 15th century, and most spellings have not been revised to reflect the long-term changes in pronunciation that are typical for ...
Many sounds are spelled using different letters or multiple letters, and for those words whose pronunciation is predictable from the spelling, the sounds denoted by the letters depend on the surrounding letters. For example, th represents two different sounds (the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives) (see Pronunciation of English th), and ...
[note 9] For example, letters with a rightward-facing hook at the bottom represent retroflex equivalents of the source letters, and small capital letters usually represent uvular equivalents of their source letters. There are also several letters from the Greek alphabet, though their sound values may differ from Greek.