alphabet
Pronunciation: /ˈæl.fəˌbɛt/
The English word “alphabet” has 8 meanings listed here.
noun
- The set of letters used when writing in a language.
- A writing system in which letters represent phonemes. (Contrast e.g. logography, a writing system in which each character represents a word, and syllabary, in which each character represents a syllable.)
- A writing system in which there are letters for the consonant and vowel phonemes. (Contrast e.g. abjad.)
- A typically finite set of distinguishable symbols.
- An individual letter of an alphabet; an alphabetic character.
- The simplest rudiments; elements.
- An agent of the FBI, the CIA, or another such government agency.
verb
- To designate by the letters of the alphabet; to arrange alphabetically.
Etymology
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…
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About this dictionary
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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.