Letter (alphabet) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article includes a list of references, but its sources

remain unclear becau se it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (October 2009) A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; fr om the 1728 Cyclopaedia. Ancient Greek letters on a vase A letter is a grapheme (written character) in an alphabetic system of writing, s uch as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone (sound) in the spoken form of the language. Letters also appear in abjads (alphabets with consonants only). Written signs in other writing systems are best called syllabograms (which denot e a syllable) or logograms (which denote a word or phrase). Contents 1 Definition and usage 1.1 A classical definition 2 History 3 Types of letters 3.1 Various scripts 3.2 Upper and lower case 3.3 Typeface and font 4 Letter frequencies 5 Footnotes 6 See also 7 Sources 8 References 9 External links Definition and usage[edit source | edit] Further information: Grapheme, Glyph, and Character (symbol) "Letter," borrowed from Old French lettre, entered Middle English around AD 1200 , eventually displacing the native English term bocstaf (i.e. bookstaff). Letter derives ultimately from Latin littera, itself of unknown origin. The Middle Eng lish plural lettres could refer to an epistle or written document, reflecting th e use of the Latin plural litter. Use of the singular letter to refer to a writte n document emerged in the 14th century. As symbols that denote segmental speech, letters are associated with phonetics. In a purely phonemic alphabet, a single phoneme is denoted by a single letter, b ut in history and practice letters often denote more than one phoneme. A pair of letters designating a single phoneme is called a digraph. Examples of digraphs in English include "ch", "sh" and "th". A phoneme can also be represented by thr ee letters, called a trigraph. An example is the combination "sch" in German. A letter may also be associated with more than one phoneme, with the phoneme dep ending on the surrounding letters or etymology of the word. As an example of pos itional effects, the Spanish letter c is pronounced [k] before a, o, or u (e.g. cantar, corto, cuidado), but is pronounced [?] before e or i (e.g. centimo, ciud ad). Letters also have specific names associated with them. These names may differ wi th language, dialect and history. Z, for example, is usually called zed in all E nglish-speaking countries except the U.S., where it is named zee. Letters, as elements of alphabets, have prescribed orders. This may generally be known as "alphabetical order" though collation is the science devoted to the co mplex task of ordering and sorting of letters and words in different languages.

In Spanish, for instance, is a separate letter being sorted after n. In English, n and are sorted alike. Letters may also have numerical value. This is true of Roman numerals and the le tters of other writing systems. In English, Arabic numerals are typically used i nstead of letters. Letters may be used as words. The words a (lower or uppercase) and I (always upp ercase) are the most common English letter-words. Sometimes O is used for "Oh" i n poetic situations. In extremely informal cases of writing (such as SMS languag e) individual letters may replace words, e.g. u may be used instead of "you" in English, when the letter is pronounced as a homophone of the word. People and objects are sometimes named after letters, for one of these reasons: The letter is an abbreviation, e.g. "G-man" as slang for a