alphabet

American  

[al-fuh-bet, -bit] / ˈæl fəˌbɛt, -bɪt /

noun

1. the letters of a language in their customary order.

2. any system of characters or signs with which a language is written.

   the Greek alphabet.

3. any system of characters or signs used to represent the sounds of a language.

   the phonetic alphabet.

4. first elements; basic facts; simplest rudiments.

   the alphabet of genetics.

5. the alphabet, a system of writing, developed in the ancient Middle East and transmitted from the northwest Semites to the Greeks, in which each symbol ideally represents one sound unit in the spoken language, and from which most alphabetic scripts are derived.

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alphabet British  

/ ˈælfəˌbɛt /

noun

1. a set of letters or other signs used in a writing system, usually arranged in a fixed order, each letter or sign being used to represent one or sometimes more than one phoneme in the language being transcribed

2. any set of symbols or characters, esp one representing sounds of speech

3. basic principles or rudiments, as of a subject

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Other Word Forms

• prealphabet adjective

Etymology

Origin of alphabet

First recorded in 1375–1425; late Middle English alphabete from Late Latin alphabētum, alteration of Greek alphábētos; alpha, beta

Example Sentences

Each letter in a standard Caesar cipher is replaced by the one three spots down the alphabet so an ‘A’ becomes a ‘D.”

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 2, 2026

In their experiments, these structures reached a record 48 dimensions and included more than 17,000 distinct topological signatures, creating a vast new "alphabet" for encoding stable quantum information.

From Science Daily • Mar. 21, 2026

Even Americans who have never watched a minute of C-SPAN, or get a little lost in the alphabet soup of other agencies, will probably never forget standing in Yosemite Valley and admiring a towering waterfall.

From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 14, 2026

The American presidency is an alphabet soup of acronyms.

From Slate • Mar. 11, 2026

Centuries later, Mendel had stumbled on the essential structure of that information, the alphabet of the code.

From "The Gene" by Siddhartha Mukherjee