Knowra English alphabet English alphabet The English alphabet is the set of 26 letters, from A to Z, used to write modern English. Its letters represent speech sounds imperfectly and vary in pronunciation by context.
Letter (alphabet) : A written character that represents a sound or serves another function in an alphabetic writing system. Each of the alphabet’s 26 members is a letter.
Latin alphabet : The writing system descended from ancient Italic scripts and used by many languages worldwide. The English alphabet is a modern adaptation of this writing system.
English orthography : The conventions governing how English words are spelled and punctuated. Orthography assigns written roles to the alphabet’s letters and combinations.
English-language spelling : The conventional sequence of letters used to write English words. The alphabet supplies the characters used to spell English vocabulary.
Cyrillic script : A writing system used by Russian and several other languages, with a letter inventory distinct from Latin. It represents many languages with a script other than English’s Latin alphabet.
Uppercase : The larger letter forms used at sentence beginnings, in names, and in other conventions. The alphabet has uppercase forms such as A, B, and C.
Old English alphabet : The collection of letters used to write Old English, including characters later dropped from standard English. Old English used additional letters such as thorn and ash.
Phoneme : A contrastive speech sound that can distinguish words within a language. Letters often represent phonemes, though the mapping is not one-to-one.
Alphabet book : A book that teaches letters, often pairing each with a word or illustration. Alphabet books introduce the English letter sequence to beginning learners.
Greek alphabet : The alphabet used to write Greek, with letters such as alpha, beta, and omega. Its distinct letter inventory influenced the history of alphabetic writing.
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