English alphabet


The modern English alphabet is a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form. It originated around the 7th century from the Latin script. Since then, letters have been added or removed to give the current Modern English alphabet of 26 letters. The word alphabet is a compound of first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta.
The exact shape of printed letters varies depending on the typeface, and the shape of handwritten letters can differ significantly from the standard printed form, especially when written in cursive style.
Written English has a number of digraphs and some longer multigraphs, and is the only major modern European language that requires no diacritics for native words. A diaeresis may be used to distinguish two vowels with separate pronunciation from a double vowel, such as "coöperation". Very occasionally, a grave may be used to indicate that a normally silent vowel is pronounced.

Letter names

Modern letters

The names of the letters are sometimes spelled out. Some compound words, derived forms and objects named after letters may be written with the letter names. The spellings listed below are from the Oxford English Dictionary. Plurals of consonant names are formed by adding -s or -es in the cases of aitch, ess, and ex. Plurals of vowel names add -es, but these are rare. Most commonly, the letter and not its name is used, in which case plural just adds -s.

Etymology

The names of the letters are for the most part direct descendants, via French, of the Latin names.
The regular phonological developments are:
The novel forms are aitch, a regular development of Medieval Latin acca; jay, a new letter presumably vocalized like neighboring kay to avoid confusion with established gee ; vee, a new letter named by analogy with the majority; double-u, a new letter, self-explanatory ; wye, of obscure origin but with an antecedent in Old French wi; izzard, from the Romance phrase i zed or i zeto "and Z" said when reciting the alphabet; and zee, an American levelling of zed by analogy with other consonants.
Some groups of letters, such as pee and bee, or em and en, are easily confused in speech, especially when heard over the telephone or a radio communications link. Spelling alphabets such as the ICAO spelling alphabet, used by aircraft pilots, police and others, are designed to eliminate this potential confusion by giving each letter a name that sounds quite different from any other.

Ampersand

The ampersand has sometimes appeared at the end of the English alphabet, as in Byrhtferð's list of letters in 1011. & was regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, as taught to children in the US and elsewhere. An example may be seen in M. B. Moore's 1863 book The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks. Historically, the figure is a ligature for the letters Et. In English and many other languages it is used to represent the word and and occasionally the Latin word et, as in the abbreviation &c.

Archaic letters

and Middle English had a number of non-Latin letters that have since dropped out of use. These either took the names of the equivalent runes, since there were no Latin names to adopt, or were runes themselves.
The most common diacritic marks seen in English publications are the acute, grave, circumflex, tilde, umlaut and diaeresis, and cedilla.

Loanwords

marks mainly appear in loanwords such as naïve and façade. Informal English writing tends to omit diacritics because of their absence from the keyboard, while professional copywriters and typesetters tend to include them.
As such words become naturalised in English, there is a tendency to drop the diacritics, as has happened with many older borrowings from French, such as hôtel. Words that are still perceived as foreign tend to retain them; for example, the only spelling of soupçon found in English dictionaries uses the diacritic. However, diacritics are likely to be retained even in naturalised words where they would otherwise be confused with a common native English word. Rarely, they may even be added to a loanword for this reason.

Native English words

Occasionally, especially in older writing, diacritics are used to indicate the syllables of a word: cursed is pronounced with one syllable, while cursèd is pronounced with two. For this, è is used widely in poetry, e.g. in Shakespeare's sonnets. J.R.R. Tolkien uses ë, as in O wingëd crown.
Similarly, while in chicken coop the letters -oo- represent a single vowel sound, they less often represent two which may be marked with a diaresis as in zoölogist and coöperation. This use of the diaeresis is rare but found in some well-known publications, such as MIT Technology Review and The New Yorker.
In general, these devices are not used even where they would serve to alleviate some degree of confusion.

Punctuation marks within words

Apostrophe

The apostrophe is not considered part of the English alphabet nor used as a diacritic even in loanwords. But it is used for two important purposes in written English: to mark the "possessive" and to mark contracted words. Current standards require its use for both purposes. Therefore, apostrophes are necessary to spell many words even in isolation, unlike most punctuation marks, which are concerned with indicating sentence structure and other relationships among multiple words.
s are often used in English compound words. Writing compound words may be hyphenated, open or closed, so specifics are guided by stylistic policy. Some writers may use a slash in certain instances.

Frequencies

The letter most commonly used in English is E. The least used letter is Z. The frequencies shown in the table may differ in practice according to the type of text.

Phonology

The letters A, E, I, O, and U are considered vowel letters, since they represent vowels, although I and U represent consonants in words such as "onion" and "quail" respectively.
The letter Y sometimes represents a consonant and sometimes a vowel. Very rarely, W may represent a vowel —a Welsh loanword.
The consonant sounds represented by the letters W and Y in English are referred to as semi-vowels by linguists, however this is a description that applies to the sounds represented by the letters and not to the letters themselves.
The remaining letters are considered consonant letters, since when not silent they generally represent consonants.

History

Old English

The English language itself was first written in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, in use from the 5th century. This alphabet was brought to what is now England, along with the proto-form of the language itself, by Anglo-Saxon settlers. Very few examples of this form of written Old English have survived, mostly as short inscriptions or fragments.
The Latin script, introduced by Christian missionaries, began to replace the Anglo-Saxon futhorc from about the 7th century, although the two continued in parallel for some time. As such, the Old English alphabet began to employ parts of the Roman alphabet in its construction. Futhorc influenced the emerging English alphabet by providing it with the letters thorn and wynn. The letter eth was later devised as a modification of dee, and finally yogh was created by Norman scribes from the insular g in Old English and Irish, and used alongside their Carolingian g.
The a-e ligature ash was adopted as a letter in its own right, named after a futhorc rune æsc. In very early Old English the o-e ligature ethel also appeared as a distinct letter, likewise named after a rune, œðel. Additionally, the v-v or u-u ligature double-u was in use.
In the year 1011, a monk named Byrhtferð recorded the traditional order of the Old English alphabet. He listed the 24 letters of the Latin alphabet first, then 5 additional English letters, starting with the Tironian note ond, an insular symbol for and:

Modern English

In the orthography of Modern English, thorn, eth, wynn, yogh, ash, and œ are obsolete. Latin borrowings reintroduced homographs of æ and œ into Middle English and Early Modern English, though they are largely obsolete, and where they are used they are not considered to be separate letters, but rather ligatures. Thorn and eth were both replaced by th, though thorn continued in existence for some time, its lowercase form gradually becoming graphically indistinguishable from the minuscule y in most handwriting. Y for th can still be seen in pseudo-archaisms such as "Ye Olde Booke Shoppe". The letters þ and ð are still used in present-day Icelandic, while ð is still used in present-day Faroese. Wynn disappeared from English around the 14th century when it was supplanted by uu, which ultimately developed into the modern w. Yogh disappeared around the 15th century and was typically replaced by gh.
The letters u and j, as distinct from v and i, were introduced in the 16th century, and w assumed the status of an independent letter. The variant lowercase form long s lasted into early modern English, and was used in non-final position up to the early 19th century. Today, the English alphabet is considered to consist of the following 26 letters:
Written English has a number of digraphs, but they are not considered separate letters of the alphabet:

Ligatures in recent usage

Outside of professional papers on specific subjects that traditionally use ligatures in loanwords, ligatures are seldom used in modern English.
The ligatures æ and œ were until the 19th century used in formal writing for certain words of Greek or Latin origin, such as encyclopædia and cœlom, although such ligatures were not used in either classical Latin or ancient Greek. These are now usually rendered as "ae" and "oe" in all types of writing, although in American English, a lone e has mostly supplanted both.
Some fonts for typesetting English contain commonly used ligatures, such as for,,,, and. These are not independent letters, but rather allographs.

Proposed reforms

Alternative scripts have been proposed for written English—mostly extending or replacing the basic English alphabet—such as the Deseret alphabet, the Shavian alphabet, Gregg shorthand, etc.