Scholars disagree about who first made the alphabet. In 2010 Orly Goldwasser argued that the first alphabet was invented by illiterate Canaanite miners inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs, while Anson Rainey argued for highly sophisticated Northwest Semites. As of November 2026 the question is still argued; some of the earliest alphabet writing was found at Egyptian turquoise mines, and a group of Semitic-speaking people borrowed some Egyptian hieroglyphs to write the sounds of their own language. Alan Gardiner made a major breakthrough in 1916 by reading the word b`lt (Baalat). He concluded that the Sinai signs were made by reshaping Egyptian hieroglyphic signs.

The early letter system worked by acrophony. Each sign stood for the first sound of the word for the thing it pictured. So a sign no longer stood for the whole object but only for one sound. In the early alphabet an ox head, called alpu, stood for the sound a, and a house, called betu, stood for the sound b. Most Phoenician letters kept the names of the pictures they came from. So the letter names were the names of everyday things such as the ox and the house; the word alphabet is Greek, formed from the Greek names of the first two signs in the series, alpha and beta.

The Greek historian Herodotus told that the Ionians learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians and changed the shapes of a few letters, yet they still called it the Phoenician alphabet. The Greek alphabet developed from the Phoenician script around the 8th century BCE. When the Greeks took the 22 Phoenician letters, they may have added vowels and two more letters, which would bring the total to 24. So the Greek alphabet grew from 22 letters to 24 by adapting the old set; the Greek alphabet grew out of Phoenician alphabets by the addition of vowels. The Phoenician alphabets, in turn, were probably inspired by Egyptian hieratic writing.

The Euboean Greek alphabet, and so the Etruscan alphabet that came from it, combines forms from the west and east Greek alphabets, which is sometimes called a West Greek alphabet. Cumae, west of Naples, is the oldest Greek colony in Italy and was founded by people from Euboea about 750 BC. The Etruscans began writing about 700 BC in a form of the Greek alphabet closest to the one used at Cumae. A Latin alphabet of 23 letters was derived in the 600s BC from the Etruscan alphabet of 26. In Etruscan the gamma was written C and stood for both the hard g and k sounds in Latin, which was confusing.

In Latin the letters I and V stood for both vowel and consonant sounds. So one letter did two jobs. The Emperor Claudius tried to separate the vowel and consonant sounds of I and V by inventing new letters. But only in medieval times (11th century) did J and W solve the problem. The old Greek letter koppa became the model for the Latin letter Q, which in Latin was always used in the combination QV, as in the modern QU. The Greek alphabet, later adopted by the Etruscans and then the Romans, became the basis for the modern alphabet. The Latin, Cyrillic and other later alphabets are modifications of the Greek alphabet.

The World's Writing Systems project counts exactly 293 writing systems in the world, as a snapshot of research in January 2022. The number can change as scholars find and sort scripts. In a syllabary, one sign stands for a whole syllable. In an abugida, signs are consonant-and-vowel pairs in which the consonant is the main part. Unlike an abjad or abugida, a true alphabet gives separate letters to individual vowels and consonants. The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, all consonants, and is written right to left. All 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet stand for consonants. The Arabic script has been extended to write many other languages, such as Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi and Uyghur.

Other scripts show how many shapes the idea took. Devanagari is used for writing classical Sanskrit and its modern descendant Hindi. It is not a strict alphabet: each consonant letter stands for one consonant sound but also has an inherent vowel built in; the Ge'ez script of the Ethiopia and Eritrea region began as an abjad with only consonants, then by about the 4th century became an abugida. Morocco officially recognized Amazigh (Berber) in July 2001 and made the Tifinagh alphabet official for writing it in February 2003. As of November 2026, Cyrillic is used to write more than 50 languages, including Russian, Ukrainian and Serbian. Georgian has had three scripts in turn. The language once had 38 letters and is now written with 33.

Some scripts were designed on purpose. A monk named Mesrop Mashtots was asked to create an alphabet for the Armenian language, and around 406 he produced a unique alphabet of thirty-six letters. Hangul was created in 1443 and promulgated in 1446. King Sejong wanted to spread literacy and erase barriers. But the alphabet's principal opponents were scholars and nobles. It was deliberately built as a system that grows a small set of basic characters into a regular pattern. Sequoyah worked alone for about 12 years and finished the Cherokee syllabary in 1821. Chinese characters usually stand for a one-syllable word or word-part. So Chinese is called logographic.

Alphabetical order is much older than its wide use as a finding tool. In ancient Alexandria, the librarian Zenodotus was, as far as scholars know, the first person to use alphabetical order, in a glossary of rare words that he compiled. Sorting by alphabet as a way to find things was not widely used until the 13th century.

Words to know

• acrophony: first-sound rule
• abugida: vowel-marked script
• syllabary: syllable signs
• Euboean: from Euboea
• logographic: word-based writing