alphabet
n. countablen. a set of letters or symbols used to write a language. You use these letters in a specific order to make words.
n. a standard set of letters or characters used to represent the phonemes of a spoken language in written form. Usually follows a fixed, conventional order.
The English alphabet has twenty-six letters.
Children usually learn to sing the alphabet before they begin to read simple words.
Scholars believe the Phoenician alphabet served as the primary ancestor for many modern writing systems, including Greek and Latin.
From Middle English alphabete, borrowed from Classical Latin alphabētum, from Ancient Greek ἀλφάβητος (alphábētos), from ἄλφα (álpha) and βῆτα (bêta), the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, Α (A) and Β (B), lowercase forms α and β. The Greek names derived from aleph, the name of the Phoenician letter 𐤀 (ʾ, “ox”) and beth, the name of the letter 𐤁 (b, “house”), so called because they were pictograms of those objects, having developed from the Egyptian hieroglyphs F1 (𓃾) and pr (𓉐). Doublet of alfabeto.
Usually takes the definite article 'the' when referring to the system of a specific language.