ETYM Latin alphabetum, from Greek alpha + beta, the first two Greek letters; Hebrew âleph and bete: cf. French alphabet.
A character set that includes letters.
Set of conventional symbols used for writing, based on a correlation between individual symbols and spoken sounds, so called from alpha (a) and beta (b), the names of the first two letters of the classical Greek alphabet. The earliest known alphabet is from Palestine, about 1700 BC. Alphabetic writing now takes many forms—for example, the Hebrew aleph-beth and the Arabic script, both written from right to left; the Devanagari script of the Hindus, in which the symbols “hang” from a line common to all the symbols; and the Greek alphabet, with the first clearly delineated vowel symbols.
Each letter of the alphabets descended from Greek represents a particular sound or sounds, usually grouped into vowels (a, e, i, o, u, in the English version of the Roman alphabet), consonants (b, p, d, t, and so on) and semivowels (w, y). Letters may be combined to produce distinct sounds (for example, a and e in words like tale and take, or o and i together to produce a “wa” sound in the French loi), or may have no sound whatsoever (for example, the silent letters gh in high and through).

In communications and data processing, the subset of a complete character set, including letters, numerals, punctuation marks, and other common symbols as well as the codes used to represent them. See also ASCII, CCITT, character set, EBCDIC, ISO.