Origins Of The Alphabet: 26 Incredible Origin Stories From A-Z

Did you know that each letter of the alphabet has its own origin story? 

There are snakes and eyes and weapons.

And five of them used to all be the same letter!

What were those Greeks thinking?! 

If you think you already know some of these, you have 26 chances to be right!

Are you ready to discover the origins of the alphabet? 

If you prefer watching videos to reading, hit play on the video version of this post below. Otherwise, keep scrolling to discover the 26 fascinating stories behind the letters of the alphabet.

Origins Of The Alphabet: The Letters

A

The letter A used to be upside-down! Or was it sideways?

And it didn’t say “Ay”, it was more like a glottal stop.

It comes from the Phoenician letter aleph, and it looked like the head of an ox with horns.

But the Phoenician alphabet didn’t have vowels, so the Greeks turned it into the vowel alpha.

B

B began 4000 years ago as a picture of a house in Egyptian hieroglyphics – a bird's eye view representing shelter. 

The Semitic word for house is beth, and it looks like that house kept flipping over until it got comfy! 

C

Letter C has been sharp, and it’s been round, but what is its sound?

It wasn’t just English that couldn’t decide – the Greeks used it for a different sound altogether. 

In fact, C used to be the exact same letter as another one – see if you can guess before it comes up. 

D

D, the door, may have originally been a fish! 

There are many different Egyptian hieroglyphs for this one.

Perhaps the open flap of a tent? 

Anyway, the Phonecians used it as a door. And the Greeks turned it into delta. Then the Romans flipped it and called it D. 

E

Letter E started as a happy stick figure man with his arms up and it meant “joy” to the Egyptians. 

Later in time, it probably meant window, but wait for this.  

It used to be called “He” like “hen” and had the sound of H! 

But the Greeks flipped it for easier writing, and changed the pronunciation to an ‘ee’ sound.

OK… ready for a dangerous letter? 

F

F once looked like a Y and sounded like “wow”, which came from a mace in Egyptian, and a hook in Phoenician. 

What’s a mace? Check out the screenshot below. It's a nasty-looking weapon.

The Greeks tipped it over – a lot of tipping over going on – and they called it di-gamma because it looked like gamma with an extra line. 

What's a gamma? It’s the one after F, of course! 

As for the sound, it was the Romans who changed it to “FF”.

Oh – and F is one of the famous 5 who all came from the same letter…

Any guesses what the other four are?

G

So gamma is G, but what does it mean?

At first it was a boomerang or a throwing stick. But it meant a camel in Phonecian. 

It always had a “Guh” sound, hence gamma in Greek. And it kicked the Greek letter zeta to the end of the alphabet. 

Crazy times! And the Romans? 

Well, they used it for both G and K sounds. Except it looked like a C.

Wait, that doesn’t work, does it?! So letter G had to get some boots! 

H

Next is the letter ‘H’. And H was a fence (pop it onto its side and add an extra bar or two) that made a throaty, breathy sound. 

Now, the ancient Greeks did have an H sound at first, but later they lost the sound. So they said “we don’t need this letter”, and they dropped poor old H.

Well, it’s been lost and found quite a few times since then, even in English. And that should tell you why H sometimes pronounced, and sometimes not!

By the way, guys, just remember that all of these letters came on very long journeys, so there are a few opposing origin stories. And some are much more complicated than this. I’m just giving you the whirlwind version! We good?

I

In 1000 BC the letter i was called yod and sounded like Y in “yes”.

It was a leg and hand, but later it changed to an arm and a hand.

Then the Greeks called it iota and made it a vertical squiggle till 700 BC when it turned into a boring old straight line. 

But ‘i’ had a little sister.

J

The letter J is completely different.

It’s the baby of the alphabet – the last letter we got, in fact!

And no ancient people involved.

See, in the early days, no-one needed the sound of J. That's because Julius Caesar wasn't pronounced as we say it today. Listen to the Latin version here. No J needed.

It actually started out as no more than a fancy flourish that you’d write when there were two I’s in a row.

Thank goodness Gian Giorgio Trissino created the lovely loopy J in 1524! 

K

K started out as a hand minus a few fingers! 

In Semitic it was called kaph (cuff) which meant the palm of the hand. 

When the Greeks adopted it in 800 BC, it became kappa and – all together now – it flipped to the right.

L

Now, L has always been called ‘El’ and to the Egyptians, it was the leg of their god Osiris.

And it changed direction many times.

It was upside-down and looked like a hook, then reversed and turned into a cattle prod. 

The Greeks faced it right and straightened it a bit, and the Romans… oh, you know the rest.  

M

M is awesome! 

M used to look like wavy water. Because it was water. And there were five or six waves, not two! 

In 1800 BC the ancient Semites reduced it to three waves, then the Phoenicians calmed that sea to only two waves. 

And eventually, the peaks became zigzags and the rest is history. 

N

Letter N started life as a snake, maybe a cobra – this was Egypt.

The Semites turned it into a fish called nun. And in 1000 BC the Greeks named it nu.

Still looks like a kinky snake, to me! 

Does it get weirder than a snake? Read this one… 

O

O began as an i. No, an actual eye!

It had a deep, throaty sound back then.

The Phoenicians reduced the hieroglyphics to only the pupil of the eye. Can you see it? 

Actually, the Greeks rather liked this one, and used it to make another variation for the end of their alphabet.

Anybody know what that letter is?

P

The letter P is a bit of a mystery.

The hieroglyph looks like a mouth. And it stayed like that until 1000 BC, when it became an inverted V shape.

Was it still a mouth? Well, its name still meant mouth. 

The Greeks turned it into something familiar – pi. How’s your maths?

But on the Greek island of Thera, it became rounder.

And finally, the Romans flipped it to the right and closed the loop. 

Q

Now what about Q?

Q is the exotic one that only shows up once in every 510 letters in English!

But the meaning? It was a needle, a knot, or a monkey with a tail – I know, not at all confusing!

It started as a throaty k-sound. And then Latin gave Q a curly tail to make it super cool.

And if you wonder where Q got its U – well, that’s a Romance story! Romance languages that is. And they just happen to be some of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn.

R

Where were we? P, Q, R!

In Egypt, letter R was a human head in profile, facing left, and pronounced resh which meant head.

The weird thing is that in hieroglyphics, R was also a mouth, like P.

But they’re not related. Those Egyptians were just complicated.

Anyway, the Greeks added a little tail, and flipped it to make left-to-right writing easier. Then the Romans turned the tail into a leg, and gave it a trilled sound!

S

S is the cooler sibling of W. I know – weird. 

It started off as a horizontal wavy W that made a shh sound, and very early S’s may have been the bow of an archer. 

However in Phoenician it meant “tooth”, but Greek didn’t have a shh sound, so they made it vertical and named it sigma. And then the Romans made it curvy. 

Fun fact: In some Italic alphabets, you could write an S in up to six zig-zagging strokes if you wanted to!

T

The Phoenician letter T looked like our lowercase t.

Back then, it was used only as a mark for illiterate people who couldn’t sign their own names.

Centuries later, the Greeks added the cross at the top  to distinguish it from an X. And what was X? We’re nearly there! 

U

The letter U initially looked like a Y in 1000 BC.

Wait a sec, where have we seen this before?

Here come the 5 siblings! 

This letter had the same beginnings as F, V, W and Y.

V

The Etruscans and Romans preferred this shape for letter V.

But in Latin, V was a vowel that sounded like U. And it took French and Italian to give it the V sound we know! 

W

Okay, so how is W different, then? 

When the Anglo-Saxons came, they used the letter wynn from the old Runic alphabet of the Vikings, which meant “joy”. 

Later on, Charlemagne’s scribes wrote it as two U’s side by side. And eventually this double-u symbol became W. 

X

X was a fish in Phoenician and back then it had a hard S sound. 

In 900 BC its Greek name changed to more of a Scottish “ch” as in loch.

But in Latin, the sound was different.

So the Romans took the X sound from another alphabet and combined it with the Greek symbol, and X was born. 

Y

The shape of the Latin letter Y comes from the Greek letter upsilon.

This was in 100 BC. And it got a little foot to distinguish it! 

Z

And finally, we’re at Z. What do you think Z was? 

The Phoenicians had a letter that meant an axe, or a sword, which looked like a capital i. 

The Greeks named it zeta and gave it the dz sound,

But nobody needed it for centuries.

Allegedly, the Romans removed it from the alphabet because it “looked like the tongue of a corpse”!

So it wasn’t even used until the Norman French came along with strange words that needed the sound of Z. 

Origins Of The Alphabet

So there you have it, the origins of the alphabet. How many did you get right?

If origins are your kind of thing, then you'll love this post about the origins of language. And don't miss this one all about 33 mind-blowing language facts.

Before you go, if you want to learn a new language, no matter its origins, then the best way is to learn through stories, not rules. Check out all my StoryLearning courses and levels and get a free trial of the course of your choice.

Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.