alphabet

American  

[al-fuh-bet, -bit] / ˈæl fəˌbɛt, -bɪt /

noun

alphabets plural

1. the letters of a language in their customary order.

2. any system of characters or signs with which a language is written.

   the Greek alphabet.

3. any system of characters or signs used to represent the sounds of a language.

   the phonetic alphabet.

4. first elements; basic facts; simplest rudiments.

   the alphabet of genetics.

5. the alphabet, a system of writing, developed in the ancient Middle East and transmitted from the northwest Semites to the Greeks, in which each symbol ideally represents one sound unit in the spoken language, and from which most alphabetic scripts are derived.

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alphabet British  

/ ˈælfəˌbɛt /

noun

1. a set of letters or other signs used in a writing system, usually arranged in a fixed order, each letter or sign being used to represent one or sometimes more than one phoneme in the language being transcribed

2. any set of symbols or characters, esp one representing sounds of speech

3. basic principles or rudiments, as of a subject

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• prealphabet
  adjective

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• alphabets
  plural

Etymology

Origin of alphabet

First recorded in 1375–1425; late Middle English alphabete from Late Latin alphabētum, alteration of Greek alphábētos; see alpha, beta

Explanation

An alphabet is a set of all the letters in a written language. The letters in an alphabet represent the different sounds in that language. When you sing the A, B, C song, you are singing the English alphabet. Rock on. If you grew up speaking English, you're most familiar with the English alphabet, which is based on the 26-letter Latin alphabet. Other languages, like German, use this same alphabet with a few added characters, like Ü and ß, to represent specific sounds in spoken German. The Greek root of alphabet is alphabetos, a combination of the first and second letters in the Greek alphabet, alpha, and beta.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

alphabet alphabets

"I can make out all the letters of the alphabet, even the smallest ones," he marvelled, pointing to his phone screen.

From Barron's ● May 27, 2026

"Korean is known as the most scientific language on the planet and the actual alphabet you can learn in four hours," she said.

From BBC ● Apr. 6, 2026

Color is so fundamental to how we describe the world that we learn its vocabulary almost as early as the alphabet.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 27, 2026

In their experiments, these structures reached a record 48 dimensions and included more than 17,000 distinct topological signatures, creating a vast new "alphabet" for encoding stable quantum information.

From Science Daily ● Mar. 21, 2026

Barbara used a Caesar cipher, which replaces each letter with one farther along in the alphabet.

From "The Woman All Spies Fear" by Amy Butler Greenfield

Czernowitz was by then a Habsburg afterimage: Jews, Germans, Romanians, Ukrainians and Poles, brushing past one another in schools, markets and cafes, their lives conducted in competing alphabets.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 5, 2026

A major advantage of shaping photons is that it allows researchers to use high-dimensional encoding alphabets.

From Science Daily ● Feb. 26, 2026

She has potty-trained children, taught them Spanish, taught them their alphabets and colors and has made sure they were ready for school by the time they entered kindergarten.

From Seattle Times ● May 15, 2024

So the Shakespeare skeptics were convinced that by looking closely at the letters used to spell each word in Shakespeare’s works, they could make out two different alphabets and uncover a code from Francis Bacon.

From Scientific American ● Oct. 12, 2023

Government linguists devised the modified Roman alphabet adopted in 1928 by Turkey for writing Turkish, as well as the modified Cyrillic alphabets designed for many tribal languages of Russia.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond