Alpha

How to spell alpha

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce alpha

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does alpha mean?

1. nounThe first letter of the Greek alphabet, often used to mean the first or beginning of something.
2. adjectiveDescribing the most dominant or assertive individual in a social group.

Alpha in a sentence

• noun

  The textbook explained that alpha is the first letter in Greek.

• adjective

  The documentary followed the alpha wolf that led the pack on every hunt.

• noun

  The software release was labelled alpha to mark its earliest test version.

• adjective

  Colleagues described the new manager as an alpha personality who took charge of every meeting.

Where does alpha come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Alpha is the name of the first letter of the Greek alphabet, written as the symbol that gave us our capital A. The Greeks did not invent the name; they borrowed it from the Phoenician letter aleph, which literally meant 'ox' and whose shape originally suggested an ox's head. As the Greeks adopted the Semitic writing system around the eighth century BCE, they reshaped aleph into alpha and reassigned it to a vowel sound. Because alpha opens the alphabet (a word itself built from alpha plus beta), it came to stand for 'the first' or 'the beginning', which is why the Bible pairs it with omega, the last letter, in the phrase 'the alpha and the omega'. English took the word directly from Greek, and its 'ph' spelling preserves the Greek letter phi-style transliteration of the original sound, a clue that the word is classical rather than native.

How the word is built

• alpha (name of the first Greek letter, from Phoenician aleph meaning 'ox')