Alphabetical

How to spell alphabetical

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce alphabetical

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does alphabetical mean?

1. adjectiveArranged in the conventional order of the letters of the alphabet.

Alphabetical in a sentence

• The library shelves the novels in alphabetical order by author.

• She filed the invoices in alphabetical sequence to find them faster.

Where does alphabetical come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek alphabetos, the name for the writing system itself, which was simply formed by joining the names of its first two letters, alpha and beta. Those Greek letter-names were in turn borrowed from a Semitic source, where aleph meant 'ox' and beth meant 'house', a reminder that the earliest letters began as little pictures of objects. Latin took the word in as alphabetum, and from there it passed into English by the early 1500s as 'alphabet'. The adjective 'alphabetical', meaning 'arranged in the order of the letters', was built on top of it with the familiar -ical ending. The spelling trap sits in the unstressed middle: the 'bet' is easy, but the schwa-coloured 'a' before it and the second unstressed 'a' near the end are both easy to slur or drop when writing quickly.

How the word is built

• alpha
• beta (the first two letters of the Greek alphabet)
• -ic
• -al (adjective suffixes)