- the letters of a language in their customary order.
- any system of characters or signs with which a language is written: the Greek alphabet.
- any system of characters or signs used to represent the sounds of a language: the phonetic alphabet.
- first elements; basic facts; simplest rudiments: the alphabet of genetics.
- a system of writing, developed in the ancient Middle East and transmitted from the northwest Semites to the Greeks, in which each symbol ideally represents one sound unit in the spoken language, and from which most alphabetic scripts are derived.
- a set of letters or other signs used in a writing system, usually arranged in a fixed order, each letter or sign being used to represent one or sometimes more than one phoneme in the language being transcribed
- any set of symbols or characters, esp one representing sounds of speech
- basic principles or rudiments, as of a subject
