English alphabet

The letters

The English alphabet has 26 letters:

Letter	Letter name (IPA)
A	/eɪ/
B	/biː/
C	/siː/
D	/diː/
E	/iː/
F	/ɛf/
G	/dʒiː/
H	/eɪtʃ/ or /heɪtʃ/
I	/aɪ/
J	/dʒeɪ/
K	/keɪ/
L	/ɛɫ/
M	/ɛm/
N	/ɛn/
O	/oʊ/
P	/piː/
Q	/kjuː/
R	/ɑː/ (non-rhotic) or /ɑɹ/ (rhotic)
S	/ɛs/
T	/tiː/
U	/juː/
V	/viː/
W	/dʌbəl juː/
X	/ɛks/
Y	/waɪ/
Z	/zɛd/ or /ziː/ (the latter in American English only)

Unfortunately, these common names for the letters are hard to distinguish from each other. The NATO phonetic alphabet gives each letter a name specifically designed to sound different from any other. Therefore, aircraft pilots and many other people use the NATO phonetic alphabet names instead of these common names.

Notes

The letters A, E, I, O, U are vowels; sometimes Y and W are considered vowels too, which are called semivowels. The remaining letters are consonants. The letter most frequently used in English is E. The least frequent used letters are Q, X, and Z.

The English alphabet is derived from the Latin alphabet. The letter W and the distinctions between I and J, U and V were introduced in continental Europe during the Middle Ages. The Roman ligatures Æ and Œ are still used in British English for certain words of Greek or Latin origin, such as "encyclopædia" and "cœlom".

In Old English Æ was adopted as a letter on its own and called æsc ("ash"), and in very early Old English Œ also appeared as a distinct letter named œæel. Other Old English letters (also used in Middle English and modern Icelandic) are Þ (thorn) and Ð (eth). Other archaic letters used in Old English were Ȝ (yogh) and Ƿ (wynn), which were later replaced by G and W respectively. The variant lower-case form ſ (long s) lasted into early modern English and was used up to the early nineteenth century.

Historically the ampersand (&), was considered to be the twenty-seventh letter of the English alphabet, although the figure is properly a logogram for the word and.