The largest alphabets in the narrow sense include Kabardian and Abkhaz ( for Cyrillic ), with 58 and 56 letters, respectively, and Slovak ( for the Latin script ), with 46.

In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish " true " alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads and abugidas.

The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad, which through its successor Phoenician is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin ( via the Old Italic alphabet ), Cyrillic ( via the Greek alphabet ) and Hebrew ( via Aramaic ).

( The system is not limited to alphabets in the strict technical sense ; languages that use a syllabary or abugida, for example Cherokee, can use the same ordering principle provided there is a set ordering for the symbols used.

Ideographic scripts, that is, writing systems composed principally of logograms, cannot be used to produce pangrams in the literal sense, since they are radically different from alphabets or other phonetic writing systems.

The Brahmic family of alphabets used in India use a unique order based on phonology: The letters are arranged according to how and where they are produced in the mouth.

In accordance with the principle on which alphabets are based, these rules will generally map letters of the alphabet to the phonemes ( significant sounds ) of the spoken language.

Several Cyrillic alphabets with 28 to 44 letters were used in the beginning and the middle of the 19th century during the efforts on the codification of Modern Bulgarian until an alphabet with 32 letters, proposed by Marin Drinov, gained prominence in the 1870s.

Among the types of diacritic used in alphabets based on the Latin script are:

The new Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, and Gagauz alphabets are based on the Turkish alphabet and its same diacriticized letters, with some additions.

These shows have featured large collections of his gridfonts, his ambigrams ( pieces of calligraphy created with two readings, either of which is usually obtained from the other by rotating or reflecting the ambigram, but sometimes simply by " oscillation ", like the Necker Cube or the rabbit / duck figure of Joseph Jastrow ), and his " Whirly Art " ( music-inspired visual patterns realized using shapes based on various alphabets from India ).

In this function, it was borrowed in the 8th century BC by the Etruscan and other Old Italic alphabets, which were based on the Euboean form of the Greek alphabet.

Manual alphabets based on the Arabic alphabet, the Ethiopian syllabary and the Korean hangul syllabary-alphabet use handshapes that are more or less iconic representations of the characters in the writing system.

Some manual representations of non-Roman scripts such as Chinese, Japanese, Devanagari, Hebrew, Greek, Thai and Russian alphabets are based to some extent on the one-handed Latin alphabet described above.

The stylised lightning bolt " SS " runes were derived from the Armanen runes of Guido von List, which he had loosely based on the indigenous runic alphabets of the Germanic peoples.

The alphabets used are based on the Old Italic alphabet, which is itself based on the Greek alphabet.

With the general adoption of the Ionic alphabet, Greek settled on an angle at the top ; the Romans, borrowing from Western alphabets, put the angle at the lower left.

The term Latin alphabet may refer to either the alphabet used to write Latin ( as described in this article ), or other alphabets based on the Latin script, which is the basic set of letters common to the various alphabets descended from the classical Latin one, such as the English alphabet.

Orthographies that use alphabets and syllabaries are based on the principle that the written symbols ( graphemes ) correspond to units of sound of the spoken language: phonemes in the former case, and syllables in the latter.

The Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets, based primarily on the Greek uncial writing of the 9th century, are the oldest known Slavic alphabets and were created by the two brothers and their students, in order to translate the Bible and other texts into the Slavic languages.

After the discovery and excavation of these monuments and associated stone slabs by Russian archaeologists in the wider area surrounding the Orkhon Valley between 1889 and 1893, it became established that the language on the inscriptions was the Old Turkic language written using the Orkhon script, which has also been referred to as " Turkic runes " or " runiform " due to a superficial similarity to the Germanic runic alphabets.

The character set allowed in the Domain Name System is based on ASCII and does not allow the representation of names and words of many languages in their native scripts or alphabets.

Various alphabets that were historically used in Mongolia, on the table at the entrance into a temple.

Mongols in Inner Mongolia and other parts of China, on the other hand, continue to use alphabets based on the traditional Mongolian script.

There were originally seventeen sectors along the Normandy coastline with codenames taken from one of the spelling alphabets of the time, from Able, west of Omaha, to Rodger on the east flank of the invasion area.

Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented with ligatures, such as æ in Old English and Icelandic and Ȣ in Algonquian ; by borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn þ in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Futhark runes ; and by modifying existing letters, such as the eth ð of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified d. Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian, and Italian, which uses the letters j, k, x, y and w only in foreign words.

The Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet, and other abjads of the Middle East are developments of the Aramaic alphabet, but because these writing systems are largely consonant-based they are often not considered true alphabets.

Some alphabets disregard tone entirely, especially when it does not carry a heavy functional load, as in Somali and many other languages of Africa and the Americas.

* The original order (), used for lettering, derives from the order of the Phoenician alphabet, and is therefore similar to the order of other Phoenician-derived alphabets, such as the Hebrew alphabet.

In other Latin alphabets, they may distinguish between homonyms, such as French là " there " versus la " the ," which are both pronounced.

Each Japanese syllabic alphabet ( hiragana or katakana, see Kana ) would fit, but like several other alphabets of the world they aren't encoded in the ISO / IEC 8859 system.

Letters in other alphabets that stemmed from lambda include the Latin L and the Cyrillic letter El ( Л, л ).

Teleprinters for languages using other alphabets also use an additional third shift state, in which they print letters in the alternative alphabet.

Several cultures whose languages use writing systems other than alphabets do not share the Western notion of signatures per se: the " signing " of one's name results in a written product no different from the result of " writing " one's name in the standard way.

It has spawned several alphabets, either as attempts to fix its perceived shortcomings, or to allow the notation of other languages, such as Sanskrit and Tibetan.

**: Category: Phonetic alphabets: lists other phonetic transcription systems

**: Category: Spelling alphabets: lists other spelling alphabets

There are also adapted Quikscript alphabets for other languages, using the same letters for sounds which do not exist in English.

These manual alphabets ( also known as finger alphabets or hand alphabets ), have often been used in deaf education, and have subsequently been adopted as a distinct part of a number of sign languages around the world.

Because such schemes were implemented by hand, only a handful of different alphabets could be used ; anything more complex would be impractical.

Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the West and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of Arabic ( in earlier order of its abjad ), the reduced Hebrew, and more distantly Greek, and Latin alphabets on the one hand, and of the Ge ' ez alphabet on the other.

On the other hand, the Japanese and Koreans primarily employ native alphabets for the names of the elements ( Katakana and Hangul, respectively ).

Different manual alphabets may be used, such as the one-handed ASL alphabet ( the receiver places their hand over the back of the hand of the signer ) or the two-handed manual alphabet, which is often used in a form adapted for deafblind communication, known as the Deafblind alphabet, in which letters are produced onto palm of the receiver's hand.