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Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word alphabet is a compound of alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet. Old English was first written down using the Latin alphabet during the 7th century.
English orthography is the writing system used to represent spoken English, [ 1][ 2] allowing readers to connect the graphemes to sound and to meaning. [ 3] It includes English's norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation . Like the orthography of most world languages, English orthography has a broad ...
The International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects complies all the most common applications of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to represent pronunciations of the English language . These charts give a diaphoneme for each sound, followed by its realization in different dialects. The symbols for the diaphonemes are given in ...
English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in early medieval England on the island of Great Britain. [ 4][ 5][ 6] The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to Britain.
For centuries, there have been movements to reform the spelling of the English language. Such spelling reform seeks to change English orthography so that it is more consistent, matches pronunciation better, and follows the alphabetic principle. [1] Common motives for spelling reform include making learning quicker, making learning cheaper, and ...
Definition and usage. A letter is a type of grapheme, the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes, the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words.
Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Braille characters. English Braille, also known as Grade 2 Braille, [1] is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of around 250 letters ( phonograms ), numerals, punctuation, formatting marks, contractions, and abbreviations ( logograms ).
Throughout Wikipedia, the pronunciation of words is indicated using the International Phonetic Alphabet ( IPA ). The following tables list the IPA symbols used for English words and pronunciations. Please note that several of these symbols are used in ways that are specific to Wikipedia, and differ from those used by dictionaries.