Interesting facts about the English alphabet include the following:
1. The English word alphabet comes to us, by way of Latin, from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha, and beta. These Greek words were, in turn, derived from the original Semitic names for the symbols: Aleph (“ox”) and beth (“house”).
2. The original set of 30 signs, known as the Semitic alphabet, was used in ancient Phoenicia beginning around 1600 BCE.
3. Most scholars believe this alphabet, consisting of signs for consonants only, is the ultimate ancestor of virtually all later alphabets.
4. The most common word in English is THE.
5. The longest word in English which doesn’t use the letter E is floccinaucinihilipilification.
6. Each letter has both a majuscule (major) and a minuscule (minor) version. Many modern conventions such as clear capital letters and spaces between words date back to a system of writing called Carolingian minuscule from around the 10th century.
7. About 100 languages use the same alphabet as English, making it one of the most widely used alphabets in the world.
8. The most common word in English is “the.”
9. The longest word in English, which uses the letter E, is “integrity.”
10. A sentence that contains all 26 letters of the English alphabet is called a pangram. A famous pangram is: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
