Alphabet

How to spell alphabet

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce alphabet

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does alphabet mean?

1. nounThe full set of letters used to write a language, arranged in a fixed conventional order.

Alphabet in a sentence

• The English alphabet has 26 letters.

• Children learn the alphabet before reading.

Where does alphabet come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek alphabetos, formed by simply joining the names of the first two letters of the Greek writing system: alpha and beta. Those letter names were themselves borrowed from a Semitic source, where aleph meant 'ox' and bet meant 'house', a reminder that the earliest letters began as little pictures of everyday things. Greek passed the compound into Late Latin as alphabetum, and it entered English in the early 1500s. The structure is wonderfully literal: the word for the whole set of letters is just its first two letters spoken aloud, much as we might call something an 'ABC'. Because the 'ph' preserves the Greek letter phi, the spelling keeps that classical fingerprint rather than a plain 'f'.

How the word is built

• alpha (first Greek letter)
• bet (from beta, second Greek letter)