A ( named a, plural aes ) is the first letter and vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

The earliest certain ancestor of " A " is aleph ( also called ' aleph ), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet ( which, by consisting entirely of consonants, is an abjad rather than a true alphabet ).

The first " true alphabet " in this sense is believed to be the Greek alphabet, which is a modified form of the Phoenician alphabet.

The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος ( alphabētos ), from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.

Alpha and beta in turn came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and originally meant ox and house respectively.

The indication of the vowels is the same way as the indication of the consonants, therefore it was the first true alphabet.

The word " alphabet " in English has a source in Greek language in which the first two letters were " A " ( alpha ) and " B " ( beta ), hence " alphabeta ".

The name " abjad " ( ) is derived from pronouncing the first letters of the Arabic alphabet in order.

The Greek alphabet thus became the world's first " true " alphabet.

Alpha ( uppercase Α, lowercase α ; Álpha ) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet.

Plutarch, in Moralia, presents a discussion on why the letter alpha stands first in the alphabet.

Ammonius asks Plutarch what he, being a Boeotian, has to say for Cadmus, the Phoenician who reputedly settled in Thebes and introduced the alphabet to Greece, placing alpha first because it is the Phoenician name for ox — which, unlike Hesiod, the Phoenicians considered not the second or third, but the first of all necessities.

ABC are the first three letters of the Latin alphabet, and they may refer to:

ABCD is a list of the first four letters in the English alphabet.

* A ( Cyrillic ), the first letter of the Early Cyrillic alphabet

The first four poems ( chapters ) are acrostics, like some of the Psalms ( 25, 34, 37, 119 ), i. e., each verse begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet taken in order.

The first, second, and fourth have each twenty-two verses, the number of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet.

N ' ko came first into use in Kankan, Guinea as a Maninka alphabet and disseminated from there into other Mande-speaking parts of West Africa.

The string whose first letter appears earlier in the alphabet comes first in alphabetical order.

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 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.

Thomsen described the script as " Turkish runes ", and it is still occasionally described as " runic " or " runiform " by comparison to the Old Germanic alphabet used for epigraphy during roughly the same period.

Their examples can be described by an inductively defined family of regular expressions over the binary alphabet as follows – cf.

A style of writing is described as a script, hand or alphabet ( Fraser and Kwiatkowski 2006 ; Johnston 1909: Plate 6 ).

Ileitis terminalis was first described by Polish surgeon Antoni Leśniowski in 1904, however, due to the precedence of Crohn's name in the alphabet, it became later to be known in the worldwide literature as Crohn's disease.

Although commonly referred to as the " Thai alphabet ", the character set is in fact not a true alphabet but an abugida, a writing system in which each consonant may invoke an inherent vowel sound, described as an implied ' a ' or ' o '.

Þ was originally taken from the runic alphabet and is described in the First Grammatical Treatise:

The dialect's perception was boosted in 2008, due to an internet video, The Black Country Alphabet, which described the whole alphabet in Black Country speak.

Psalmanazar's book also described the Formosan language and alphabet, which is significant for being an early example of a constructed language.

In modern Hungarian, the script is known as, or, ; for short also simply " notch, score ") Because it is superficially reminiscent of the runic alphabet, the Old Hungarian script has also been described as " runic " or " runiform ".

The reciting of the Sanskrit alphabet, the chanting of mantras, the reading aloud of the scriptures, and performance of music and dance are also described as constituting acts of her worship.

Since the number of identified mutations has exceeded the number of letters in the alphabet, subscripts have been added to most recent discoveries in this area, as in the Pittsburgh mutation described above.

Orthographies such as those of German, Hungarian ( mainly phonemic with " ly, j " representing the same sound, but consonant and vowel length are not always accurate and various spellings reflect etymology, not pronunciation ), Portuguese, and that of the modern Greek language ( written with the Greek alphabet ), as well as Korean hangul, are sometimes considered to be of intermediate depth ( for example they include many morphophonemic features, as described above ).

Since the number of identified mutations has exceeded the number of letters in the alphabet, subscripts have been added to most recent discoveries in this area, as in the Pittsburgh mutation described above.

In the United States, the Federal Government is described as an alphabet soup on account of the multitude of agencies that it has spawned, including the NSA, CIA, FBI, USSS, BATF, DEA, NCIS and INS.

This phrase is especially used to described the alphabet agencies of the New Deal during the Great Depression.

A style of writing is described as a script, hand or alphabet.

Each moon is associated with a tree from the Celtic ogham tree alphabet as described in Robert Graves ' classic book The White Goddess.

Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka ( Latin Belarusian ), Łatynka ( Latin Ukrainian ), Vilamovian, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai alphabet.

Sometimes this problem is addressed by the use of such devices as digraphs ( such as sh and ch in English, where pairs of letters represent single sounds ), diacritics ( like the caron on the letters š and č, which represent those same sounds in Czech ), or the addition of completely new symbols ( as some languages have introduced the letter w to the Latin alphabet ).

In the Latin alphabet, this is accidentally the case with the letters " b " and " p "; however, labial " m " is completely dissimilar, and the similar-looking " q " and " d " are not labial.

Quikscript replaces traditional English orthography, which uses the Latin alphabet, with completely new letters.

" By 1814 Young had completely translated the " enchorial " ( demotic, in modern terms ) text of the Rosetta Stone ( he had a list with 86 demotic words ), and then studied the hieroglyphic alphabet but initially failed to recognize that the demotic and hieroglyphic texts were paraphrases and not simple translations.

The reform removed pairs of completely homophonous graphemes from the Russian alphabet ( i. e., and, and, and ), bringing the alphabet closer to Russian's actual phonological system.

More difficult systems use a non-standard form of the alphabet, such as writing it backwards in the grid, up and down in the columns, or a completely randomized set of letters.

To underscore its patriotism and its break with tradition, the Hankyoreh became the first daily to completely reject the use of hanja and use only hangul ; it continues to make only limited use of the Latin alphabet and limits the use loanwords.

Also the Armenian alphabet can contribute critical characters: Several Armenian characters like օ, ո, ս, as well capital Տ and Լ are often completely identical to Latin characters in modern fonts.

This uncertainty is because the actual Tamil word for the city uses an alphabet that is phonetically between M and N, and sometimes even completely substituted by G ( pronounced Palayangkottai in colloquial Tamil ).

Once it has been implemented for a given alphabet and word length m, however, its running time is completely predictable — it runs in O ( mn ) operations, no matter the structure of the text or the pattern.

" In order to cope with his inability to make decisions, Jake is prescribed three therapies by his Doctor — the completely arbitrary principles of Sinistrality (" If the alternatives are side by side, choose the one on the left "), Antecedence (" if they're consecutive in time, choose the earlier ") and Alphabetic Priority (" choose the alternative whose name begins with the earlier letter of the alphabet ").