People have written in more than one way. Some signs are logograms, and a logogram stands for a whole word, not just a sound. 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. An abjad writes only the consonants. So the reader fills in the vowels. Unlike an abjad or abugida, a true alphabet gives separate letters to individual vowels and consonants. Egyptian hieroglyphs mixed several kinds of signs, including logograms and phonograms that stand for sounds. So they were never only pictures of things. They could be read in columns, from top to bottom. They could also be read in rows, starting from the right or the left.
Some of the earliest alphabet writing was found at Egyptian turquoise mines. Most of the early alphabet inscriptions were found in or near the mines. These were at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai. Flinders Petrie found early inscriptions there in 1904 and 1905. A group of Semitic-speaking people borrowed some Egyptian hieroglyphs to write the sounds of their own language. In the early alphabet, an ox head, called alpu, stood for the sound a. A house, called betu, stood for the sound b. That is why the letter we call A began as a picture of an ox head. The picture of a house gave the sign for B.
Ugarit was an important seaport city. It stood in the northern part of the ancient Levant, in what is now northern Syria. Its alphabet had 30 letters and was written in cuneiform, with a simple stylus pressed into clay. Phoenician was the first major phonemic script, with an alphabet dated around 1100 BCE. The oldest Phoenician alphabet inscription is on the sarcophagus of Ahiram of Byblos. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters. It was written from right to left, like Hebrew and Arabic. Its letters left out the vowels. A reader had to supply the vowel sounds.
The Greeks learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians around the 8th century BC. They added letters for vowels. The word alphabet is Greek. It was formed from alpha and beta. These are the Greek names of the first two signs in the series. The Romans got their alphabet from the Etruscans, who had used a Greek alphabet. A Latin alphabet of 23 letters was derived in the 600s BC from the Etruscan alphabet of 26. J, U and W were not in the Roman alphabet. They were added in medieval times. The Latin alphabet spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire.
Other peoples built their own scripts. Cyrillic is named for Cyril, who made the older Glagolitic alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet itself was created later. Scholars of the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire made it. As of November 2026, Cyrillic is used to write more than 50 languages, including Russian, Ukrainian and Serbian. A monk named Mesrop Mashtots was asked to create an alphabet for the Armenian language. Around 406 he produced a unique alphabet of thirty-six letters, though sources differ slightly on the exact year. As of November 2026, the Khmer alphabet of Cambodia has 74 letters. According to one account, the Rotokas alphabet of Bougainville Island has only 12 letters. That is fewer than any other alphabet in modern use.
Korea's alphabet was made on purpose. Hangul was created in 1443 under King Sejong. It has 14 basic consonants and 10 vowels. Its letters were designed to look like the human speech organs, such as the lips. In the Cherokee language, Sequoyah worked alone for about 12 years to make a writing system. In it, each symbol stands for a syllable of spoken Cherokee.
Our letters kept changing. Caroline minuscule was a small-letter handwriting style. It developed toward the end of the 8th century in conjunction with Charlemagne's program of reform. The Great Vowel Shift was not a single event. It was a gradual series of changes in how English long vowels were pronounced, spread over several centuries. Wynn, the Old English letter for the w sound, was largely gone by 1300.
Words to know
- alphabet: set of letters
- abjad: consonant alphabet
- syllabary: syllable signs
- Cyrillic: Russian-type alphabet
- Phoenician: sea trader
