Egyptian hieroglyphic script developed in Egypt around 3200 BCE. It started with over a thousand signs. These were later cut to about 750. By about 2700 BCE Egyptian writing had around 22 hieroglyphs. Each one stood for a syllable beginning with a single consonant. The Rosetta Stone carries one decree written in three ways, including hieroglyphics. Because the stone also had Greek, scholars could compare the texts. Jean-Francois Champollion cracked the hieroglyphic code. The signs were never only pictures. Egyptian hieroglyphs mixed several kinds of signs. Some were logograms that stand for words. Others were phonograms that stand for sounds.

After Flinders Petrie found early inscriptions in the Sinai, he decided they were alphabetic. He did not try to find which later scripts they were related to. Ugarit's texts all come from the Late Bronze Age, about 1550 to 1200 BCE. In 1928 a farmer accidentally uncovered a tomb there. He was working in his field. The Ugarit alphabet was written in cuneiform, with a simple stylus pressed into clay. Most of the early alphabet inscriptions were found in or near the turquoise mines. These were at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai. A group of Semitic-speaking people borrowed some Egyptian hieroglyphs to write the sounds of their own language.

The 22 Phoenician letters were simplified from Egyptian hieroglyph pictures. They took on a standard form at the end of the 12th century BCE. So the alphabet grew out of an older picture-writing system. It was not invented from nothing. Before about 1000 BCE the Phoenician language was written with cuneiform wedge signs common across Mesopotamia. The alphabet replaced a much more complicated writing system with one of only 22 letters. Most Phoenician letters kept the names of the pictures they came from. Two examples are the ox and the house.

An alphabet could be used to write other languages easily, unlike cuneiform or hieroglyphics. This helped the Phoenician letters spread to people who spoke other languages. In the 9th century BCE the Aramaeans adopted the Phoenician alphabet. So Phoenician letters were already used by another people. That was about a century before the Greeks began to write with them. 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. So Greek letters sit at the end of a long chain of borrowing. Phoenician was written from right to left. Its letters left out the vowels. A reader had to supply the vowel sounds.

In its early years there were many variants of the Greek alphabet. Boustrophedon was a style of Greek writing. It ran from right to left and then left to right on alternate lines. The letter shapes flipped with the direction of each line. The letters Y and Z were added at the end of the Latin alphabet in the first century BC. They were used to spell Greek loan words. Even after the fall of the Roman Empire the Latin alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. The classical Roman alphabet had 23 letters, and J, U and W were added in medieval times. The Latin alphabet of 23 letters was derived in the 600s BC from the Etruscan alphabet of 26.

The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters, all consonants, and is written right to left. Five letters take a different shape at the end of a word. All 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet stand for consonants. Short vowels are usually left unmarked in ordinary writing, though extra marks can be added to show them. The Arabic script has been extended to write Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi and Uyghur. This shows how one script can be borrowed for languages with different sounds. Devanagari is used for writing classical Sanskrit and its modern descendant Hindi. It is not a strict alphabet, because each consonant letter has an inherent vowel built in. The Khmer script of Cambodia counts 33 consonants and 23 dependent vowels that attach to consonants. It also counts 12 independent vowels that can stand alone. As of November 2026, it is counted as an alphabet of 74 letters.

The Korean alphabet was originally composed of 28 letters, each designed to represent a sound. It has since been reduced to the 24 basic letters used in modern Hangul. Hangul was created in 1443 and promulgated in 1446. Its letters were designed to look like the human speech organs, such as the lips. King Sejong wanted to spread literacy and erase barriers. But the alphabet's principal opponents were scholars and nobles. Sequoyah worked alone for about 12 years and finished the Cherokee syllabary in 1821. Its characters each stand for a syllable. So it is a syllabary rather than an alphabet.

Alphabetical order is much older than its wide use as a finding tool. In ancient Alexandria, the librarian Zenodotus compiled a glossary of rare words. As far as scholars know, he was the first person to use alphabetical order. Sorting by alphabet as a way to find things was not widely used until the 13th century. The Pinakes is a work linked to the scholar Callimachus. It is often called the first card catalog. It was not a catalog of the works held by the Library of Alexandria, whatever popular accounts say. Caroline minuscule, the small-letter script of Charlemagne's time, was the ultimate source of our modern Roman lowercase alphabet. It finally became the predominant script in most scriptoria around the year 820.

The name zed is by far the oldest English name for the letter Z. It comes through French and Latin from the name of the Greek letter zeta. The American name zee for the letter Z is thought to have started as a dialect variation of zed. Wynn, the Old English letter for the w sound, was largely gone by 1300. The Great Vowel Shift was not a single event. It was a gradual series of changes. They affected how English long vowels were pronounced, over several centuries.

Words to know

• alphabet: set of letters
• syllabary: syllable signs
• boustrophedon: ox-turning writing
• hieroglyphic: picture-writing
• Hangul: Korean alphabet