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	English
Related scripts
Parent systems	(Proto-writing) Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic script Phoenician alphabet Greek alphabet Old Italic alphabet Latin alphabet English alphabet
Child systems	ISO basic Latin alphabet Cherokee syllabary Scots alphabet Osage alphabet Saanich writing system
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Latn (215), ​Latin
Unicode
Unicode alias	Latin
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.

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. The earliest Old English writing during the 5th century used a runic alphabet known as the Anglo-Saxon futhorc. The Old English Latin alphabet was adopted from the 7th century onward—and over the following centuries, various letters entered and fell out of use. By the 16th century, the present set of 26 letters had largely stabilised:

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.