Why is the Alphabet in Alphabetical Order?

Podcast Transcript

All of you are familiar with the ABCs. It is one of the very first things that children are taught.

Not only are they taught the letters that comprise the alphabet, but they are also, usually at the same time, taught the order of the alphabet.

The order of the alphabet is something that is so ingrained that most of us usually don’t even think about it. Yet, if you think about it, the order of the letters is completely arbitrary, but if we didn’t have an order, our world would be very different.

Learn more about why the alphabet is in alphabetical order on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Way back in the very first months of this podcast, I did an episode on the Latin Alphabet.

Today, I want to take a different approach to the subject. I want to address a very basic question that most people never think about yet permeates almost everything we do: the order of the alphabet.

The origins of our alphabet are shockingly ancient. To understand the order of our alphabet, we first have to understand the origins of the alphabet. I will go over some of the ground from that original episode, but I’ll also be going into more depth.

The origin of our alphabet, which is known as the Latin or Roman alphabet, actually goes back all the way to ancient Egypt and its system of hieroglyphics. The earliest known hieroglyphics date back to approximately 3200 BC. There are over 700 known hieroglyphic symbols.

Egyptian hieroglyphics were a complex writing system that combined logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements. They were not an alphabet in the modern sense but instead had multiple types of symbols that conveyed meaning in different ways.

Logograms are symbols that represent entire words. For example, a picture of the sun could mean the word “sun” or refer to the Egyptian god Ra.

Phonograms are symbols that represent sounds. Some hieroglyphs represented specific sounds, similar to letters in an alphabet.

For example, the hieroglyph for an owl represents the sound “m.”

Egyptian hieroglyphics were a far cry from a phonetic alphabet like we have today.

In addition to the hieroglyphics we see on the walls of Egyptian temples, there was also a simplified form of cursive used by scribes known as Egyptian Hieratic Script. This was a more informal system of writing used on papyrus for administrative purposes such as keeping inventory and sending messages.

Around 1800–1500 BC, Semitic-speaking people in the Sinai Peninsula, likely influenced by their interactions with Egyptian culture and trade networks, began adapting certain hieroglyphic symbols to create a more streamlined writing system.

These early adaptations formed what is now called the Proto-Sinaitic script, which marked a crucial step toward the development of an alphabet. Unlike hieroglyphics, which had hundreds of symbols representing entire words or syllables, Proto-Sinaitic used a much smaller set of symbols—around 22—to represent individual consonant sounds.

The Proto-Sinaitic script continued to evolve and spread, especially among the Phoenicians, a seafaring civilization known for their extensive trade networks across the Mediterranean. By around 1050 BC, the Phoenician alphabet had emerged as a fully developed system, consisting of 22 consonantal letters written from right to left.

This alphabet retained traces of its Egyptian origins, as some letters were directly derived from simplified versions of hieroglyphic symbols. For example, the Egyptian hieroglyph of an ox head transformed into the Phoenician letter ?Aleph, which later became the letter “A” in Greek and Latin.

Unlike Egyptian scripts, which relied on a mix of phonetic and pictorial elements, the Phoenician alphabet was purely phonetic. Its simplicity and efficiency made it highly adaptable, leading to its adoption by various other cultures.

One of the writing systems Phoenician developed into was Hebrew. The evolution of Hebrew might be a separate episode, and I will briefly mention it a bit later.

For the purposes of this discussion, the other writing system it evolved into was Greek. Greek began to develop around the 8th century BC.

The Greeks modified the Phoecian system by adding vowels, which were absent in Phoenician writing, creating the first true alphabet.

The Greeks had established colonies in southern Italy, most notably in regions such as Cumae, near the modern city of Naples. These Greek settlers brought their writing system with them, which was based on a variant of the Greek alphabet. The Etruscans, who were native people on the Italian peninsula, had a sophisticated culture but lacked their own written script at the time. They adopted the Greek alphabet and modified it to suit their own linguistic needs.

One of the key changes that occurred during this transition was the elimination of certain Greek letters that were unnecessary for the Etruscan language. Since Etruscan phonetics did not include voiced stops like B, D, and G, the corresponding Greek letters beta (?), delta (?), and gamma (?) were either unused or repurposed. Similarly, the Etruscan language lacked certain vowel sounds that were present in Greek.

While the Etruscans retained much of the Greek alphabet’s structure, they introduced modifications in letter shapes and occasionally added new symbols to accommodate specific Etruscan sounds. The resulting script maintained the right-to-left writing direction seen in early Greek inscriptions but later shifted to a left-to-right orientation.

When the early Romans (Latins) came into contact with the Etruscans, they adopted their alphabet but modified it to suit the sounds of the Latin language. The earliest known Latin inscription, the Duenos Inscription, from the 7th or 6th century BC, already shows a script very similar to the Etruscan alphabet, though distinct in some ways.

The Etruscan alphabet consisted of about 26 letters, but many of them were unnecessary for Latin because Etruscan had different phonetics. As Latin evolved, several changes occurred:

Etruscan had letters that Latin didn’t need, such as Theta (?), Phi (?), and Xi (?), which were dropped from the Latin alphabet.

Since B, D, and G were not commonly used in Etruscan, they were reintroduced or re-emphasized in Latin.

The Etruscans used C, K, and Q somewhat interchangeably, but Latin standardized C as the primary letter for the /k/ sound, making K and Q much less common.

The earliest Latin alphabet, based on the Etruscan model, contained 21 letters:

A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X

It lacked the letters J, U, W, Y, and Z.

G was created as a variant of C, so C wouldn’t have to be used for both the /k/ sound and the /g/ sound.

Y and Z were added to the Latin Alphabet after the conquest of Greece in the first century BC, mostly to spell and pronounce loanwords that came from Greek.

The letter J was introduced in the Middle Ages as a way to distinguish the consonantal form of I, which had been used for both the /i/ vowel and the /j/ consonant. By the 16th and 17th centuries, scholars and printers fully adopted J as a separate letter, using it for words like “Julius” instead of the earlier “Iulius.”

The letter U emerged in the Middle Ages as a way to distinguish the vowel /u/ from the letter V, which had been used for both the /u/ vowel and the /v/ consonant in Latin.

The letter W was introduced in the early Middle Ages by Germanic scribes who needed a way to represent the /w/ sound, which did not exist in Latin. Initially written as a doubled “VV,” it gradually evolved into a distinct letter by the 11th century, becoming officially recognized in alphabets used for languages like English and German.

So, just to recap, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics was developed into a short form called Hieratic Script, which was adopted by Semitic peoples and became the Phoenician script, which was adopted by the Greeks who added vowels, which was adopted by the Etruscans, which was then adopted by the Romans, which made the letters spread throughout Europe where the last letters were added during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Got that?

Now, you are probably saying, “Gary, thank you for the history of the alphabet. But you haven’t answered the question as to the order of the alphabet yet.”

As far as we know, there was no order to Egyptian hieroglyphics. However, some have speculated that there might have been some association with certain hieroglyphics and things such as the planets, the days of the week, and numbers.

Likewise, there appears to be no order to Proto-Sinaitic script either, nor do we even know how many characters there were.

However, by the time we get to Phoenician, we start to see the general ordering, which is very similar to the order we have in the alphabet today. Hebrew, which is a very early offshoot of Phoenician, still exhibits the same similar ordering system.

At each stage in the evolution of the alphabet, the receiving culture generally maintained the previous ordering while adapting the system to their language needs. The alphabet passed from culture to culture like a cultural artifact, with its sequence being preserved even when some letters were added or removed.

Even when languages take large deviations from these origins, such as Arabic or Cyrillic, you can still see, in some ways, the basic ordering that was on display by the Phonecians.

The unsatisfying answer is that we really don’t know why the alphabet is in the particular order it is in. We don’t know why A is first before everything else.

However, there are some theories. More on that in a second…

What we do know that the basic order has existed for over 3000 years, which is in many ways more impressive.

We do know why some letters are where they are. Y and Z are at the end because they were added to Latin after the other letters.

The letters J, U, and W were all placed next to the letter that they were derived from in the original order of the alphabet.

I should close this episode by addressing the other thing that many of you are probably wondering about. The ABC Song.

Many of us learned the alphabet from the song.

The song is a mnemonic device that helps children learn both the alphabet and its order. In fact, if you had to go through the alphabet, some of you might still just sing the song to yourself in your head because it makes it so much easier to recall.

The comedian Stephen Wright had a joke where he wondered if the order of the alphabet was due to the song.

The answer is no.

The ABC Song traces its origins to the 18th-century French melody “Ah! vous dirai-je, maman”, which is also the tune used for “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” The melody first appeared in print in 1761, and in the early 19th century, it was adapted to teach the alphabet in English-speaking countries. In 1835, American music publisher Charles Bradlee arranged and copyrighted the familiar “Alphabet Song” lyrics set to this melody, which closely resembles the version still sung today.

Now, I just mentioned there were theories as to why the order of the alphabet is the way it is.

The leading theory is that there was some early mnemonic device that was used by either the Phonecians or some other early Semitic group, which put the letters in a particular order so they could be easily remembered.

It might not have been a song, but it would have functionally served the same purpose as the ABC song insofar as it helped people learn what the letters were.

Once the order was established, it just stuck…..for over 3,000 years.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.

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Standing up for Chicago

I love this podcast! I listen to it every day as a way to get my brain started. That said, your attack on the Chicago Bears during your Third Punic War episode stuck with me so much that I made a podcast specifically about that remark… anyway, love the show!

Thanks, Dommm1215! I have to say I really don’t blame you for doing a podcast defending the Bears. The Bears need people to speak up for them….because they certainly can’t let their playing on the field do the talking.

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