alphabet

[al-fuh-bet, -bit]

noun

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.

alphabet

/ 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

Other Word Forms

• prealphabet adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of alphabet¹

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

Word History and Origins

Origin of alphabet¹

C15: from Late Latin alphabētum, from Greek alphabētos, from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet; see _alpha , _beta

Example Sentences

Cyrillic writing is based on the alphabet of ancient Greece, while the Latin alphabet used by most Western languages is based on that of ancient Rome.

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Federal Reserve officials have begun to speak more openly about the K-shaped economy, even if they don’t invoke the alphabet to describe it.

Read more on Barron's

These consonant clusters comprise multiple letters when written out in the Roman alphabet, but are one letter in the Yautja alphabet.

Read more on Los Angeles Times

It was an escape, and Follett packed it with as much detail as possible, including its own system of mathematics, its own language — Farksoo — and its own alphabet.

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Bulgarian, like Russian, uses the Cyrillic alphabet, and a complex grammar structure.

Read more on BBC