The inventor of Morse code, Samuel Morse (1791-1872), needed to know this so that he could give the simplest codes to the most frequently used letters. So, we started with a simple question, but the answer is more complex than I might have imagined.Which letters in the alphabet are used most often? This, along with the complete interchangeability of V and W, make a Swedish dictionary or phone book somewhat challenging. In the sequence of letters, they are placed at the end, after Z, instead of being next to their unaccented siblings. For example, in Swedish they have: ä, å, ö. This is commonly called a “diacritic.”Īlthough there appear to be accented letters in some languages, the users of those languages regard them as completely separate letters. Even in English, we have a similar accent, used in words like “naïve” to separate the sounds of adjacent vowels. In French, common examples are: é, è, ô, ç in German, they use an “umlaut”: ä, ö, ü. In many languages, the basic letters are modified by the use of accents. The letters U and J have only been in the alphabet for about 400 years. Wynn was replaced by “uu”, which became “w”. This is why there is “ye” as well as “the”. The nearest looking letter in the Latin alphabet was “y”, so that was used to replace it. Thorn was the “th” sound in words like “then”. Two others, “thorn” and “wynn” were lost many years ago. Later this letter was dropped from the alphabet.Īmpersand was not the first letter to be dropped. This was misheard and resulted in the modern name of “ampersand”. So people started saying “and per se” – “per se” means “by itself”. This caused confusion when the alphabet was recited because it would end with “… W, X, Y, Z, and”, which sounds odd and incomplete.

Originally, it was the last letter after Z and was simply called “and”. This is the very familiar abbreviation of “and”, which is commonly used in names of companies etc. It is not so long ago that there was a 27th letter, which looked like this: &. For the moment, I will look at how we got to 26. For example, J and K are of limited use in Italian – my Italian dictionary goes straight from I to M.Ī few languages have some extra letters, but we will come back to that. But we will stick to thinking about the Latin one.Īlthough the Latin alphabet formally has 26 letter, some languages make little of no use of some letters. Of course, there are some languages – and Greek is a familiar example – that use a different alphabet. I will return to the simple question that is the subject of this posting: how many letters are there in the alphabet? The answer, for English and most other European languages is 26, starting at A and ending with Z. Even question things that are simple facts that you have always known be be true … IMHO, a useful guide to life is: question everything. A simpler way to see things is that we know some facts, we are ignorant of many things, but we can ask questions. I wonder if anyone actually understood what idea he was attempting to elucidate. An American politician once said “There are things we know and things we do not know and there are things we know we do not know and things that we do not know that we do not know.” That, at least, encapsulates the essence of what he was trying to say.

Number of letters in alphabet