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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. Old English was first written down using the Latin alphabet during the 7th century.
English contains, depending on dialect, 24–27 consonant phonemes and 13–20 vowels. However, there are only 26 letters in the modern English alphabet, so there is not a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. Many sounds are spelled using different letters or multiple letters, and for those words whose pronunciation is ...
Letter case. The lower-case "a" and upper-case "A" are the two case variants of the first letter in the English alphabet. Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally majuscule) and smaller lowercase (more formally minuscule) in the written representation of certain languages. The ...
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. 801 –873 AD), who formally developed the method to break ciphers. Letter frequency analysis gained importance in Europe with the development of movable type in 1450 ...
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός (diakritikós, "distinguishing"), from διακρίνω (diakrínō, "to distinguish"). The word diacritic is a noun, though it is sometimes used in ...
Case sensitivity. The lowercase "a" and uppercase "A" are the two case variants of the first letter in the English alphabet. In computers, case sensitivity defines whether uppercase and lowercase letters are treated as distinct (case-sensitive) or equivalent (case-insensitive). For instance, when users interested in learning about dogs search ...
The acute accent (/ əˈkjuːt /), ́, is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed characters are available.
An example, in English, of boustrophedon as used in inscriptions in ancient Greece (Lines 2 and 4 read right-to-left.) Boustrophedon (/ ˌbuːstrəˈfiːdən / [1]) is a style of writing in which alternate lines of writing are reversed, with letters also written in reverse, mirror-style. This is in contrast to modern European languages, where ...