50 Fun Facts About Alphabet

How many letters are in the modern English alphabet?

Each has an uppercase and a lowercase form.

The word 'alphabet' comes from the first two letters of which alphabet?

Those Greek names in turn came from the Phoenician words for ox and house.

The Greek letter names alpha and beta derive from Phoenician words for what?

Aleph meant ox and bet meant house.

How many consonant letters does the Phoenician alphabet have?

It was an abjad, leaving vowel sounds unwritten.

What is an abjad, like the Phoenician or Arabic script?

Vowels are left implicit.

Which script was the first to give vowels their own independent letters?

The Greeks reused Phoenician letters for sounds that did not exist in Greek.

How many letters are in the modern Greek alphabet?

It runs from alpha to omega.

The Latin script evolved most directly from which earlier neighbouring script?

The Etruscans ruled early Rome.

Which is the most widely used writing script in the world today?

It spread across Europe with the Roman Republic.

Which letter is the most commonly used in English?

The least-used letter is Z.

Which letter is the least commonly used in English?

E is the most common.

Which two modern English letters were introduced as distinct from V and I in the 16th century?

W also became an independent letter around then.

What is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet called?

'Holoalphabetic' is another name for it.

Which sentence is the best-known example that uses every letter?

Western Union used it to test Telex equipment.

In the NATO phonetic alphabet, what word stands for the letter A?

It is spelled 'Alfa' to avoid mispronunciation by non-English speakers.

Which code word stands for the letter Z in the NATO alphabet?

'Zulu Time' is used for Greenwich Mean Time.

Why are 'Alfa' and 'Juliett' spelled with unusual endings in the NATO alphabet?

'Juliett' has a double-t so French speakers do not treat the final t as silent.

Which organisation defined the NATO phonetic alphabet in 1955-56?

Its official name is the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet.

The ampersand symbol '&' began as a ligature of which Latin word?

The name comes from 'and per se and'.

The word 'ampersand' is a corruption of which phrase?

Letters that were also words, like A, I and O, were recited as 'per se'.

Who invented the raised-dot reading system for the blind, at age 15?

He had lost his own sight in a childhood accident.

Each character in the raised-dot reading system for the blind uses a cell of how many dots?

The dots are arranged in two columns of three.

The telegraph code used to send text over wires encodes letters as which two signals?

They are also called dits and dahs.

After whom is the dot-and-dash telegraph code named?

He was one of several developers of the telegraph code.

Which Korean king created the Hangul alphabet in 1443?

Before it, Korea used Chinese characters (Hanja).

What is unusual about Hangul among the world's alphabets?

It is a 'featural' alphabet, planned by the government of the day.

Which script did Korea use before Hangul was created?

Hanja was poorly suited to Korean and contributed to high illiteracy.

The Cyrillic script is used to write which language?

Around 250 million people use Cyrillic as an official script.

The Cyrillic script became the third official script of the EU when which country joined in 2007?

About 250 million people in Eurasia use Cyrillic.

Which pair is credited with creating the Glagolitic alphabet, ancestor of Cyrillic?

Cyrillic itself was created by their disciples at the Preslav Literary School.

The first true letters were invented in ancient Egypt as an aid to writing what?

They added pronunciation hints to existing hieroglyphs.

What is a syllabary, unlike an alphabet?

Linear B, used by the Mycenaean Greeks, was one.

The Proto-Sinaitic script, an early alphabet, was left by Canaanite workers where?

It appeared around 1840 BC.

Runic alphabets like Elder Futhark are named after what?

The names come from the first runes typically listed in inscriptions.

The Old English letter thorn (þ) was borrowed from which writing system?

The letter eth (ð) was a modified d.

What is a fixed ordering of letters, as in 'alphabetical order', most useful for?

Letters can then also serve as a way of numbering items.

According to the classic frequency sequence, which letters are the three most common in English?

The old printers' order began 'etaoin shrdlu'.

What is the phenomenon of a letter having a name different from the sound it makes called?

Greek, Arabic and Hebrew have it; the Latin alphabet does not.

Which language uses the letters j, k, x, y and w only in foreign words?

Hawaiian similarly uses only a subset of the Latin alphabet.

What is the ligature 'æ', used in Danish and Icelandic, an example of?

Old English also used the runic-derived thorn.

Which NATO code word became famous as the name of a Berlin border crossing?

'Bravo Zulu' means 'well done'.

The oldest surviving text in the Phoenician script is an inscription on whose sarcophagus, c. 1000 BC?

It is the parent script of all western alphabets.

The Phoenician script was simple enough that who could learn it, aiding its spread?

It had only about two dozen letters.

'The ABC Song' shares its melody with 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star'; where does that tune come from?

Mozart later used it for his Twelve Variations, and Boston publisher Charles Bradlee copyrighted the alphabet lyrics in 1835.

Which linguist and church leader developed the Armenian alphabet around 405 AD?

The script originally had 36 letters; the 1920s reform brought the count to 39.

The Rotokas language of Papua New Guinea is written with how many Latin letters, one of the world's smallest alphabets?

Its central dialect has one of the smallest consonant inventories of any language, and it uses no diacritics.

How many letters make up the official Hawaiian alphabet, including the ʻokina?

Missionaries first used the ʻokina to tell koʻu ('my') from kou ('your'); it became an official letter in 1864.

Which Cherokee man, inspired by European 'talking leaves', invented a syllabary for his language around 1821?

He began work around 1809 despite being unable to read any existing script.

Which of Georgia's three scripts is the standard for writing modern Georgian?

Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri survive only in Georgian Orthodox Church use; the 'living culture' of all three joined UNESCO's heritage list in 2016.

How many letters did the Armenian alphabet originally contain?

Two more were added in the Middle Ages and the ligature և counted as a letter after the 1920s reform, making 39.