English alphabet

English alphabet
An English-language pangram written with the FF Dax Regular typeface
Script type	Alphabet
Time period	c. 16th century – present
Languages	Unicode range	U+0000–U+007E Basic Latin
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

There are 5 vowel letters and 19 consonant letters—as well as Y and W, which may function as either type.

Written English has a large number of digraphs, such as ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ea⟩, ⟨oo⟩, ⟨sh⟩, and ⟨th⟩. Diacritics are generally not used to write native English words, which is unusual among orthographies used to write the languages of Europe.

English alphabet

A Received Pronunciation British English speaker reciting the English alphabet

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The names of the letters are commonly spelled out in compound words and initialisms (e.g., tee-shirt, deejay, emcee, okay, etc.), derived forms (e.g., exed out,

The most common diacritic marks seen in English publications are the acute (é), grave (è), circumflex (â, î, or ô), tilde (ñ), umlaut and diaeresis (ü or ï—the same symbol is used for two different purposes), and cedilla (ç).^[2] Diacritics used for tonal languages may be replaced with tonal numbers or omitted.

Diacritic marks mainly appear in loanwords such as naïve and façade. Informal English writing tends to omit diacritics because of their absence from the keyboard, while professional copywriters and typesetters tend to include them.

As such words become naturalised in English, there is a tendency to drop the diacritics, as has happened with many older borrowings from French, such as hôtel. Words that are still perceived as foreign tend to retain them; for example, the only spelling of soupçon found in English dictionaries (the OED and others) uses the diacritic. However, diacritics are likely to be retained even in naturalised words where they would otherwise be confused with a common native English word (for example, résumé rather than resume).^[3] Rarely, they may even be added to a loanword for this reason (as in maté, from Spanish yerba mate but following the pattern of café, from French, to distinguish from mate).

Occasionally, especially in older writing, diacritics are used to indicate the syllables of a word: cursed (verb) is pronounced with one syllable, while cursèd (adjective) is pronounced with two. For this, è is used widely in poetry, e.g., in Shakespeare's sonnets. J. R. R. Tolkien used ë, as in O wingëd crown.

Similarly, while in chicken coop the letters -oo- represent a single vowel sound (a digraph), they less often represent two which may be marked with a diaresis as in zoölogist^[4] and coöperation. This use of the diaeresis is rare but found in some well-known publications, such as MIT Technology Review and The New Yorker. Some publications, particularly in UK usage, have replaced the diaeresis with a hyphen such as in co-operative.^{[citation needed]}

In general, these devices are not used even where they would serve to alleviate some degree of confusion.

The apostrophe (ʼ) is not usually considered part of the English alphabet nor used as a diacritic, even in loanwords. But it is used for two important purposes in written English: to mark the "possessive"^[n] and to mark contracted words. Current standards require its use for both purposes. Therefore, apostrophes are necessary to spell many words even in isolation, unlike most punctuation marks, which are concerned with indicating sentence structure and other relationships among multiple words.

• It distinguishes (from the otherwise identical regular plural inflection -s) the English possessive morpheme "'s" (apostrophe alone after a regular plural affix, giving -s' as the standard mark for plural + possessive). Practice settled in the 18th century; before then, practices varied but typically all three endings were written -s (but without cumulation). This meant that only regular nouns bearing neither could be confidently identified, and plural and possessive could be potentially confused (e.g., "the Apostles words"; "those things over there are my husbands"^[5])—which undermines the logic of "marked" forms.
• Many common contractions have near-homographs from which they are distinguished in writing only by an apostrophe, for example it's (it is or it has) as opposed to its, the possessive form of "it", or she'd (she would or she had) as opposed to shed.

In a

In the year 1011, a monk named Byrhtferð recorded the traditional order of the Old English alphabet.^[9] He listed the 23 letters of the Latin alphabet first, plus the ampersand, then 5 additional English letters, starting with the Tironian note ond (⁊), an insular symbol for and:

In the

The letters u and j, as distinct from v and i, were introduced in the 16th century, and w assumed the status of an independent letter. The variant lowercase form long s (ſ) lasted into early modern English, and was used in non-final position up to the early 19th century. Today, the English alphabet is considered to consist of the following 26 letters:

Written English has a number of digraphs,^[10] but they are not considered separate letters of the alphabet:

Outside of professional papers on specific subjects that traditionally use ligatures in loanwords, ligatures are seldom used in modern English. The ligatures æ and œ were until the 19th century (slightly later in American English)^{[citation needed]} used in formal writing for certain words of Greek or Latin origin, such as encyclopædia and cœlom, although such ligatures were not used in either classical Latin or ancient Greek. These are now usually rendered as "ae" and "oe" in all types of writing,^{[citation needed]} although in American English, a lone e has mostly supplanted both (for example, encyclopedia for encyclopaedia, and maneuver for manoeuvre).

Some typefaces used to typeset English texts contain commonly used ligatures, such as for ⟨tt⟩, ⟨fi⟩, ⟨fl⟩, ⟨ffi⟩, and ⟨ffl⟩. These are not independent letters – although in traditional typesetting, each of these ligatures would have its own sort (type element) for practical reasons – but simply type design choices created to optimize the legibility of the text.

There have been a number of proposals to

• Alphabet song
   – Song that teaches an alphabetPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• NATO phonetic alphabet – Letter names for unambiguous communication
• English orthography – Norms for writing the English language
• English-language spelling reform – Proposed reforms to English spelling to be more phonetic
• American manual alphabet – Manual alphabet that augments the vocabulary of American Sign Language
• Two-handed manual alphabets – Part of a deaf sign language
• English Braille – Tactile writing system for English
• American Braille – Former braille used for the English language in the United States of America
• New York Point – Tactile alphabet invented by William Bell Wait
• Chinese respelling of the English alphabet – Chinese pronunciation of the English alphabet
• Burmese respelling of the English alphabet – Burmese Transcription
• Base36 – Binary-to-text encoding scheme