A A (named a /e/, plural aes[1]) is the first letter and vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also called 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet[2] (which, by consisting entirely of consonants, is an abjad rather than a true alphabet). In turn, the origin of aleph may have been a pictogram of an ox head in protoSinaitic script[3] influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, styled as a triangular head with two horns extended. Egyptian Phoenici an aleph Semit ic Greek Alpha Etrusc an

B B (named bee /bi/[1]) is the second letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is used to represent a variety of bilabial sounds (depending on language), but most commonly a voiced bilabial stop. The capital letter 'B' may have started as a pictogram of the floorplan of a house in Egyptian hieroglyphs. By 1050 BC, the Phoenician alphabet's letter had a linear form that served as the beth. In English, most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, and the International Phonetic Alphabet, 'b' denotes the voiced bilabial plosive /b/, as in 'bib'. In English it is sometimes silent; most instances are derived from old monosyllablic words with the 'b' final and immediately preceded by an 'm', such as 'lamb' and 'bomb'; a few are examples of etymological spelling to make the word more like its Latin original, such as 'debt' or 'doubt'. Egyptian Phoenic hieroglyph ian cottage beth Greek Beta Etrusca n B Roma n B

C C (named cee /si/[1]) is the third letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is used to represent one hundred in Roman numerals. 'C' comes from the same letter as 'G'. The Semites named it gimel. The sign is possibly adapted from an Egyptian hieroglyph for a staff sling, which may have been the meaning of the name gimel. Another possibility is that it depicted a camel, the Semitic name for which was gamal. In the Etruscan language, plosive consonants had no contrastive voicing, so the Greek '' (Gamma) was adopted into the Etruscan alphabet to represent /k/. Already in the Western Greek alphabet, Gamma first took a ' ' form in Early Etruscan, then ' ' in Classical Etruscan. In Latin it eventually took the 'C' form in Classical Latin. In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters 'C K Q' were used to represent the sounds /k/ and // (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, 'Q' was used to represent /k/ or // before a rounded vowel, 'K' before 'A', and 'C' elsewhere.[2] During the 3rd century BC, a modified character was introduced for //, and 'C' itself was retained for /k/. The use of 'C' (and its variant 'G') replaced most usages of 'K' and 'Q'. Hence, in the classical period and after, 'G' was treated as the equivalent of Greek gamma, and 'C' as the equivalent of kappa; this shows in the romanization of Greek words, as in 'KAMO', 'KYPO', and 'KI' came into Latin as 'CADMVS', 'CYRVS' and 'PHOCIS', respectively. Other alphabets have letters homoglyphic to 'c' but not in use and derivation, like the Cyrillic letter Es (, ) which derives from the lunate sigma, named due to its resemblance to the crescent moon. Phoenici an gaml Arabi c m Hebre w gimel Greek Gamma Etrusca n C

D D (named dee /di/[1]) is the fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Symbol "D" is 500 in Roman numerals. The Semitic letter Dlet may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek and Latin, the letter represented /d/; in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was superfluous but still retained (see letter B). The equivalent Greek letter is Delta, ''.[citation needed] The minuscule (lower-case) form of 'd' consists of a loop and a tall vertical stroke. It developed by gradual variations on the majuscule (capital) form. In handwriting, it was common to start the arc to the left of the vertical stroke, resulting in a serif at the top of the arc. This serif was extended while the rest of the letter was reduced, resulting in an angled stroke and loop. The angled stroke slowly developed into a vertical stroke. Egyptian hierogly ph door Phoenici an daleth Greek Delta Etrusca n D Rom an D

E E (named e /i/, plural ees)[1] is a vowel and the fifth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in many languages, including: Czech,[2] Danish,[2] Dutch,[2] English,[3] French,[4] German,[5] Hungarian,[2] Latin,[2] Norwegian,[2] Spanish,[6] and Swedish.[2] Letter 'E' differs little from its derivational source, the Greek letter epsilon, ''. In etymology, the Semitic h has been suggested to have started as a praying or calling human figure (hillul 'jubilation'), and was probably based on a similar Egyptian hieroglyph that indicated a different pronunciation. In Semitic, the letter represented /h/ (and /e/ in foreign words), in Greek h became epsilon with the value /e/. Etruscans and Romans followed this usage. Although Middle English spelling used 'e' to represent long and short /e/, the Great Vowel Shift changed long /e/ (as in 'me' or 'bee') to /i/ while short /e/ (as in 'met' or 'bed') remains a mid vowel. Egyptia n hierogly ph q Phoenici an He Etrusc an E Greek Roma Epsilon n/ Cyrill ic E

F F (named ef[1] /f/)[2] is the sixth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The origin of 'F' is the Semitic letter vv (or waw) that represented a sound like /v/ or /w/. Graphically it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph such as that which represented the word mace (transliterated as (dj)):The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant, 'Y' but was also ancestor to Roman letters 'U', 'V', and 'W'); and with another form, as a consonant, digamma, which resembled 'F', but indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. (After /w/ disappeared from Greek, digamma was used as a numeral only.)In Etruscan, 'F' probably represented /w/, as in Greek; and the Etruscans formed the digraph 'FH' to represent /f/. When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used 'V' (from Greek upsilon) to stand for /w/ as well as /u/, leaving 'F' available for /f/. (At that time, the Greek letter phi '' represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /p/, though in Modern Greek it approximates the sound of /f/.) And so out of the various vav variants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which its antecedents in Greek and Etruscan did not have. The Roman alphabet forms the basis of the alphabet used today for English and many other languages.The lowercase ' f ' is not related to the visually similar long s, ' ' (or medial s). The use of the long s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with ' f ' when using a short mid-bar (see more at: S). ProtoSemiti c W Phoenicia n waw Etrusca n V or W Greek Digam ma Roma nF

F G (named gee /di/)[1] is the seventh letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant 'c' to distinguish voiced // from voiceless /k/. The recorded originator of 'g' is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a feepaying school, who taught around 230 BC. At this time, 'k' had fallen out of favor, and 'c', which had formerly represented both // and /k/ before open vowels, had come to express /k/ in all environments. Ruga's positioning of 'g' shows that alphabetic order related to the letters' values as Greek numerals was a concern even in the 3rd century BC. Sampson (1985) suggests that: "Evidently the order of the alphabet was felt to be such a concrete thing that a new letter could be added in the middle only if a 'space' was created by the dropping of an old letter."[2] According to some records, the original seventh letter, 'z', had been purged from the Latin alphabet somewhat earlier in the 3rd century BC by the Roman censor Appius Claudius, who found it distasteful and foreign.[3] Eventually, both velar consonants /k/ and // developed palatalized allophones before front vowels; consequently in today's Romance languages, 'c' and 'g' have different sound values depending on context. Because of French influence, English orthography shares this feature.

H H (named aitch /et/, plural aitches;[1] or haitch /het/ in especially HibernoEnglish)[citation needed] is the eighth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The Semitic letter '' ( '') most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts. The Greek eta '' in the Archaic period still represented /h/ (later on it came to represent a long vowel, //). In this context the letter eta is also known as heta to underline this fact. Thus, in the Old Italic alphabets the letter heta of the Euboean alphabet was adopted with its original sound value /h/. Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme but almost all Romance languages lost the sound Romanian later re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, and Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from /f/, before losing it again; various Spanish dialects have developed [h] as allophone of /s/ or /x/ in most Spanish-speaking countries, and various dialects of Portuguese use it as an allophone of //. 'H' is also used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as 'ch' which represents /t/ in Spanish, Galician, Old Portuguese and English, // in French and modern Portuguese, /k/ in Italian, French and English, /x/ in German, Czech, Polish, Slovak, one native word of English and a few loanwords into English, and // in German. Egyptian hieroglyph fence Old Semiti c Phoenician heth Gree k heta Etrus can H Latin H

I I (named i /a/, plural ies)[1] is the ninth letter and a vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative (//) in Egyptian, but was reassigned to /j/ (as in English "yes") by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound. This letter could also be used to represent /i/, the close front unrounded vowel, mainly in foreign words. The Greeks adopted a form of this Phoenician yodh as their letter iota (, ) to represent /i/, the same as in the Old Italic alphabet. In Latin (as in Modern Greek), it was also used to represent /j/ and this use persists in the languages that descended from Latin. The modern letter 'j' was firstly a variation of 'i', and both were used interchangeably for both the vowel and the consonant, coming to be differentiated only in the 16th century. The dot over the lowercase 'i' is sometimes called a tittle. In the Turkish alphabet, dotted and dotless I are considered separate letters, representing a front and back vowel, respectively, and both have uppercase ('I', '') and lowercase ('', 'i') forms.In modern English, 'i' represents different sounds, either a "long" diphthong /a/ as in kite, which developed from Middle English /i/ after the Great Vowel Shift of the 15th century, or the "short" // as in bill. Egyptian Phoenician Etruscan hieroglyph Yodh I Greek Iota

J J is the tenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its normal name in English is jay /de/ or jy /da/;[1][2] when used for the y sound, it may be called yod (/jd/ or /jod/).The letter 'J' originated as a swash character, used for the letter 'i' at the end of Roman numerals when following another 'i', as in 'xxiij' instead of 'xxiii' for the Roman numeral representing 23. A distinctive usage emerged in Middle High German.[3] Gian Giorgio Trissino (14781550) was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds, in his pistola del Trissino de le lettere nuvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana ("Trissino's epistle about the letters recently added in the Italian language") of 1524.[4] Originally, 'I' and 'J' were different shapes for the same letter, both equally representing /i/, /i/, and /j/; but Romance languages developed new sounds (from former /j/ and //) that came to be represented as 'I' and 'J'; therefore, English J, acquired from the French J, has a sound value quite different from /j/ (which represents the initial sound in the English word "yet").

K K (named kay /ke/)[1] is the eleventh letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. K is the 11th letter of the English alphabet. In English, the letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive; this sound is also transcribed by /k/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA. The letter K comes from the letter (kappa), which was taken from the Semitic kap, the symbol for an open hand.[2] This, in turn, was likely adapted by Semites who had lived in Egypt from the hieroglyph for "hand" representing D in the Egyptian word for hand, dr-t. The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value /k/ instead, because their word for hand started with that sound.[3] In modern-day English slang, the word "k" is used as a substitute for the abbreviation "O.K.", or "Okay." In International Morse code it is used to mean "over".[4] Egyptian hieroglyph D Phoenician K Etruscan K Greek Kappa

L L (named el[1] /l/)[2] is the twelfth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In Roman numerals it represents 50. Lamedh may have come from a pictogram of an ox goad or cattle prod. Some have suggested a shepherd's staff. In English, L can have several sound values, depending on whether it occurs before or after a vowel. The alveolar lateral approximant (the sound represented in IPA by lowercase [l]) occurs before a vowel, as in 'lip' or 'please', while the velarized alveolar lateral approximant (IPA []) occurs in 'bell' and 'milk'. This velarization does not occur in many European languages that use L; it is also a factor making the pronunciation of L difficult for users of languages that lack L or have different values for it, such as Japanese or some southern dialects of Chinese. L can occur before almost any obstruent (stop, fricative, or affricate) in English. Common digraphs include LL, which has a value identical to L in English, but has the separate value voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (IPA //) in Welsh, where it can appear in an initial position. A palatal lateral approximant or palatal 'L' (IPA //) occurs in many languages, and is represented by 'GL' in Italian, 'LL' in Spanish and Catalan, 'LH' in Portuguese, and '' in Latvian. In English writing, L is often silent in such words as 'walk' or 'could' (its presence can modify the preceding vowel letter's sound; e.g. 'wak' might be pronounced to rhyme with 'back'). Egyptian hieroglyph Phoenician lamedh Etruscan L Greek Lambda

M M (named em /m/)[1] is the thirteenth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu (, ). Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water. It is known[dubious discuss] that Semitic people working in Egypt c. 2000 BC borrowed a hieroglyph for "water" that was first used for an alveolar nasal (/n/), because of the Egyptian word for water, n-t. This same symbol became used for /m/ in Semitic, because the word for water began with that sound. The letter 'm' represents the bilabial consonant sound, [m], in Classical languages as well as the modern languages. The Oxford English Dictionary (first edition) says that 'm' is sometimes a vowel in words like spasm and in the suffix -ism. In modern terminology, this would be described as a syllabic consonant IPA [m]. Egyptia n hierogly ph "N" Phoenici an Mem Etrusca nM Greek Mu Roma nM

N N (named en /n/[1]) is the fourteenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like the English J, because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet. It is speculated by many that Semitic people working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphics to create the first alphabet, and that they used the same snake symbol to represent N, because their word for "snake" may have begun with that sound. However, the name for the letter in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic alphabets is nun, which means "fish" in some of these languages. The sound value of the letter was /n/as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin and all modern languages. Egyptian hieroglyp h for J Phoenicia n Nun Etrusca n N Greek Nu

O O (named o /o/, plural oes)[1] is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its graphic form has also remained fairly constant from Phoenician times until today. The name of the Phoenician letter was eyn, meaning "eye", and indeed its shape originates simply as a drawing of a human eye (possibly inspired by the corresponding Egyptian hieroglyph, c.f. Proto-Sinaitic script). Its original sound value was that of a consonant, probably [], the sound represented by the cognate Arabic letter letter ayn. The use of this Phoenician letter for a vowel sound is due to the early Greek alphabets, which adopted the letter as O "omicron" to represent the vowel /o/. The letter was adopted with this value in the Old Italic alphabets, including the early Latin alphabet. In Greek, a variation of the form later came to distinguish this long sound (Omega, meaning "large O") from the short o (Omicron, meaning "small o"). Greek omicron gave rise to the corresponding Cyrillic letter O and the early Italic letter to runic runic . Even alphabets constructed "from scratch", i.e. not derived from Semitic, usually have similar forms to represent this sound, e.g.; the creators of the Afaka and Ol Chiki scripts, each invented in different parts of the world in the last century, both attributed their vowels for 'O' to the shape of the mouth when making this sound.

P P (named pee /pi/[1] ) is the sixteenth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In English and most other European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive. Both initial and final ps can be combined with many other discrete consonants in English words. A common example of assimilation is the tendency of prefixes ending in n to assume an m sound before ps (such as: in + pulse impulse see: List of Latin words with English derivatives).A common digraph in English is ph, which represents the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/, and can be used to transliterate Phi () in loanwords from Greek. In German, the digraph pf is common, representing a labial affricate of /pf/.Arabic speakers are usually unaccustomed to pronouncing /p/; they pronounce it as /b/. In words that Arabic inherited from the ProtoSemitic language, /p/ is usually pronounced /f/.Most English words beginning with P are of foreign origin, primarily French, Latin, Greek, and Slavic;[citation needed] these languages preserve Proto-Indo-European initial /*p/. Native English cognates of such words often start with F, since English is a Germanic language and thus has undergone Grimm's law; a native English word with initial /p/ would reflect Proto-IndoEuropean initial /*b/, which is so rare that its existence as a phoneme is disputed.However, native English words with non-initial P are quite common; such words can come from either Kluge's law or the sp combination; PIE /*p/ is preserved after s. Phoenician Greek P Pi Etruscan P Latin P

Q Q (named cue /kju/[1]) is the seventeenth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The Semitic sound value of Qp (perhaps originally qaw, "cord of wool", and possibly based on an Egyptian hieroglyph) was /q/ (voiceless uvular stop), a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in English or most Indo-European ones. In Greek, this sign as Qoppa probably came to represent several labialized velar stops, among them /k/ and /k/. As a result of later sound shifts, these sounds in Greek changed to /p/ and /p/ respectively. Therefore, Qoppa was transformed into two letters: Qoppa, which stood for a number only, and Phi which stood for the aspirated sound /p/ that came to be pronounced /f/ in Modern Greek. In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters C, K and Q were all used to represent the two sounds /k/ and //, which were not differentiated in writing. Of these, Q was used before a rounded vowel (e.g. EQO 'ego'), K before /a/, and C elsewhere. Later, the use of C (and its variant G) replaced most usages of K and Q: Q survived only to represent /k/ when immediately followed by a /w/ sound.[2] The Etruscans used Q in conjunction with V to represent /k/ Egyptian Phoenician Etruscan Greek hieroglyph qoph Q Qoppa wj

R R (named ar /r/[1]) is the eighteenth letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The original Semitic letter may have been inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for tp, "head". It was used for /r/ by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was r (also the name of the letter). It developed into Greek '' (rh) and Latin R. It is likely that some Etruscan and Western Greek forms of the letter added the extra stroke to distinguish it from a later form of the letter P.[citation needed] The name of the letter in Latin was er (/r/), following the pattern of other letters representing continuants, such as F, L, M, N, and S. This name is preserved in French and many other languages. In Middle English, the name of the letter changed from /r/ to /ar/, following a pattern exhibited in many other words such as farm (compare French ferme), and star (compare German Stern). The minuscule (lowercase) form as 'r' developed through several variations on the capital form. In handwriting it was common not to close the bottom of the loop but continue into the leg, saving an extra pen stroke. The loop-leg stroke shortened into the simple arc used today. Another minuscule, r rotunda (), kept the loopleg stroke but dropped the vertical stroke, although it fell out of use around the 18th century. Egyptian hierogly ph t Phoenici an Resh Etrusc an R Greek Rho Later Etrusc an R

T T (named tee /ti/[1]) is the 20th letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language. Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets. The sound value of Semitic Taw, Greek alphabet T (Tau), Old Italic and Latin T has remained fairly constant, representing [t] in each of these; and it has also kept its original basic shape in all of these alphabets. Phoenician Etruscan Greek Taw T Tau

S (named ess /s/,[1] plural esses[2]) is the nineteenth (19th) letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Semitic n ("teeth") represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative // (as in 'ship'). Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma () came to represent /s/. In Etruscan and Latin, the /s/ value was maintained, and only in modern languages has the letter been used to represent other sounds. The minuscule form of 's' was '', called the long s, up to the fifteenth century or so, and the form 'S' was used then only as uppercase in the same manner that the forms 'G' and 'A' are only uppercase. With the introduction of printing, the modern form 's' began to be used at the end of words by some printers. Later, it was used everywhere in print and eventually spread to manuscript letters as well. For example, "sinfulness" would be rendered as "infulne" in all medieval hands, and later it was "infulnes" in some blackletter hands and in print. The modern spelling "sinfulness" did not become widespread in print until the beginning of the 19th century, largely to prevent confusion of '' with the lowercase 'f' in typefaces which had a very short horizontal stroke in their lowercase 'f'. The ligature of 's' (or 'z') became the German ess-tsett, ''. Phoenician Etruscan Greek Shin S Sigma

U U (named u /ju/, plural ues[1][2]) is the twenty-first letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet and a vowel in the English alphabet. Symbol 'U' is the chemical symbol for uranium. The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details. During the late Middle Ages, two forms of 'v' developed, which were both used for its ancestor 'u' and modern 'v'. The pointed form 'v' was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form 'u' was used in the middle or end, regardless of sound. So whereas 'valor' and 'excuse' appeared as in modern printing, 'have' and 'upon' were printed 'haue' and 'vpon'. The first distinction between the letters 'u' and 'v' is recorded in a Gothic alphabet from 1386, where 'v' preceded 'u'. By the mid-16th century, the 'v' form was used to represent the consonant and 'u' the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter 'u'. Capital 'U' was not accepted as a distinct letter until many years later.[3] Consequently, today, using capital V in place of U is occasionally done to give an archaic or Roman flavor.[4]

V V (named vee /vi/[1]) is the twenty-second letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details. In Greek, the letter upsilon '' was adapted from waw to represent, at first, the vowel [u] as in "moon". This was later fronted to [y], the front rounded vowel spelled '' in German. In Latin, a stemless variant shape of the upsilon was borrowed in early times as V either directly from the Western Greek alphabet or from the Etruscan alphabet as an intermediaryto represent the same /u/ sound, as well as the consonantal /w/. Thus, 'num' originally spelled 'NVM' was pronounced /num/ and 'via' was pronounced /wia/. From the 1st century AD on, depending on Vulgar Latin dialect, consonantal /w/ developed into // (kept in Spanish), then later to /v/. In Roman numerals, the letter 'V' is used to represent the number 5. It was used because it resembled the convention of counting by notches carved in wood, with every fifth notch double-cut to form a 'V'.

W W (named double-u,[1] plural doubleues[2][3]) is the 23rd letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In other Germanic languages, including German, its name is similar to that of English V.[4] In many languages, its name literally means "double v": Spanish doble ve (though it can be spelled uve doble),[5][note 1] French double v, Icelandic tvfalt vaff, Czech dvojit v, Finnish kaksois-vee, etc. The sounds /w/ (spelled with 'V') and /b/ (spelled 'B') of Classical Latin developed into a bilabial fricative // between vowels in Early Medieval Latin. Therefore, 'V' no longer represented adequately the labialvelar approximant sound /w/ of Germanic phonology. The Germanic /w/ phoneme was therefore written as 'vv' or 'uu' ('u' and 'v' becoming distinct only by the Early Modern period) by the 7th or 8th century by the earliest writers of Old English and Old High German.[6] Gothic (not Latin-based), by contrast, simply used a letter based on the Greek for the same sound. The digraph 'vv'/'uu' was also used in Medieval Latin to represent Germanic names, including Gothic ones like Wamba.

X X (named ex /ks/, plural exes[1]) is the twenty-fourth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In Roman numerals, it represents 10. In Ancient Greek, '' and '' were among several variants of the same letter, used originally for /k/ and later, in western areas such as Arcadia, as a simplification of the digraph '' for /ks/. In the end, more conservative eastern forms became the standard of Classical Greek, and thus '' (Chi) stands for /k/ (later /x/). However, the Etruscans had taken over '' from western Greek, and it therefore stands for /ks/ in Etruscan and Latin.[citation needed] The letter '' ~ '' for /k/ was a Greek addition to the alphabet, placed after the Semitic letters along with phi '' for /p/. (The variant '' later replaced the digraph '' for /ps/; omega was a later addition) Greek Chi Etruscan X

Y Y (named wye[1] /wa/, plural wyes)[2] is the twenty-fifth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet (next to last letter) and represents either a vowel or a consonant in English. The oldest direct ancestor of English letter Y was the Semitic letter waw, from which also come F, U, V, and W. See F for details. The Greek and Latin alphabets developed from the Phoenician form of this early alphabet. In Modern English, there is also some historical influence from the old English letter yogh (), which developed from Semitic gimel, as shown below. Phoenician Greek
Semitic

Z Z (named zed /zd/ or zee /zi/[1]) is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The Semitic symbol was the seventh letter, named zayin which possibly meant "weapon". It represented either z as in English and French, or possibly more like /dz/ (as in Italian zeta, zero). The Greek form of Z was a close copy of the Phoenician symbol I, and the Greek inscriptional form remained in this shape throughout ancient times. The Greeks called it zeta, a new name made in imitation of eta () and theta (). In earlier Greek of Athens and Northwest Greece, the letter seems to have represented /dz/; in Attic, from the 4th century BC onwards, it seems to have been either /zd/ or a /dz/, and in fact there is no consensus concerning this issue. In other dialects, as Elean and Cretan, the symbol seems to have been used for sounds resembling the English voiced and unvoiced th (IPA // and //, respectively). In the common dialect () that succeeded the older dialects, became /z/, as it remains in modern Greek. Phoenician Zayin Etruscan Greek Z Zeta