Why Is the English Alphabet Ordered This Way?

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Ever wonder how the English alphabet came to be in the so-called alphabetical order? And why do some letters have the E sounds before and some after? All M and N versus B and D. Well, want to know more? Before we get into that, a common question we often get along with this is whether languages like Chinese or Kangi Japanese with their vast complexity compared to the English alphabet has alphabet songs. And the answer to that is yes. In these writing systems, there are symbols representing only one syllable or sound. And surprisingly, the early school years often place emphasis on the simpler way to write words rather than the more complex way learned later on. For example, one of the popular such songs for the young learners of Chinese is the pinion song where instead of something like MN O, you have an Nang nong. Moving over to Japanese, there are two separate syllable alphabets besides the pictographic kangi. The hiragana and the katakana used for indigenous and foreign words respectively. Both of them originate from more complicated symbols and are given in lists with vowels horizontally and consonants vertically.

[00:01:08]Since they are ordered according to their phonetic value, the alphabet song is right there in the table. A U I E O Ko Sachi Suo and thus you have the Hiragana song. The Japanese system is given as only one example of how complex the mixture of pictograms and phonetic writing truly is. But it is not the only one. Indeed, it serves as a parallel to much of the earliest ways of writing. So if initial writing systems had this form, how did we reach the smaller phonetic alphabets common in Europe and our individual letter sounds and alphabetical order? In the first development of writing, similar words would spawn from a single original drawing and therefore often begin with a narrow vocabulary. For example, in Sumerian, head, tongue, language, and eat are all represented by the kuniform symbol for head. It is the addition of the appropriate item that clarifies which one is meant such as a line at the bottom of the head which indicates speech or mouth or a bowl which indicates eating. In the beginning, this kind of sign language is similar to what we face at an airport.

[00:02:15]It does not represent a specific language but rather consists of universally understood symbols. A plane pointing upwards means departure, whatever language you might use.

[00:02:24]Gradually, however, the initial drawings began to get abstract for very practical reasons. For example, in Babylonia, they were either writing on clay or carving on stone, both of which favored straight lines over curvy ones. So, what initially around 3000 BC was clearly a head or a fish, by 1,000 B.CE. had evolved to a bunch of lines, which while not obvious on their face, as the former picture, could be learned with proper instruction easy enough. Enter languages that had signs corresponding to certain sounds, not to what was depicted. This abstraction which is one of the less celebrated revolutionary moments in human history is related to the reebus principle. For the uninitiated, the reebus principle is the idea of using existing symbols such as pictograms purely for their sound value as a phonogram to combine and make new words.

[00:03:13]So for example, if we wanted to spell the English word belief using the reebus principle, we could draw a B and a leaf one after the other. A bee and betray could be read as betray for I we could draw a human eye. Now yes this may sound like a teenager texting but in fact this was a major step towards modern writing and note very recently perfected in a huge advancement in the evolution of writing in modern times in texting you see our video who invented the emoji and emotionicon and how they are definitely changing written language for the better. In any event, this step which paved the way for the alphabet appears to have happened simultaneously in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. Although Egyptologists and orientalists are still fighting bitterly about who was first.

[00:03:57]So if you see an Egyptian hieroglyph or a pinttail duck in a word, it is not necessarily talking about ducks. In most cases, it just forms the sound sar, which is also the word for duck in Egyptian. For example, the word sau actually means keep watch. And to write it, Egyptians use the sign of the dark sa by combining it with the sound of oo, a little hen, i.e. utilizing the reebus principle. It has a phonetic reading. If you want to actually write duck, then you put the symbol down and add a horizontal line to signify that in that case, yes, you do mean it as a pictogram. The ancient Egyptians made full use of the reebus principle. A famous statue of Rammeses II consists of three hieroglyphic elements. a large falcon representing Horus, the sun god Ra, who is standing behind a sitting child, which in Egyptian is mess. And the child is holding a sedge plant stalk in his left hand, Sue. And these three items compose the reebus rau or rameses.

[00:04:54]Apart from this fun with symbols, some of them actually did represent a specific letter or combination of letters. So a snake could stand for an F and an L for an M. rules began to develop to express grammar and syntax elements so that now nuances of grammar could be depicted. Sometimes this leads to some sentences being formed almost like with an alphabet. For example, in Egyptian today I found out could be written as such. So how did we go from there to the modern English alphabet?

[00:05:22]Step one, protoitic and seemetic alphabet. While all of this was developing, a silent revolution was taking place in the deserts of Sinai.

[00:05:30]Seemetic tribes left stone carvings that although difficult to pinpoint exactly in time since stone is not easy to date seem to have been made around 1,500 BC.

[00:05:40]The people there were obviously aware of the basics of hieroglyphics but did not use them in the normal manner taught in temples as a sacred language which is what hieroglyph means sacred carving.

[00:05:51]Yet another case where the common folk push language evolution forward. In any event, instead they went for an abstraction using all of them as one sound letters. So for example, the Egyptian hieroglyph for house is purr.

[00:06:03]In contrast, in cemetic languages, the word house is a variation of bet. Thus, they represented the first consonant of their word for house with the existing Egyptian sign for house. So purr became a b. If you look at it sideways, you will recognize an older form of our English letter or the bet that makes up the second half of the English word alphabet. Slowly this practical way of writing spread across the seatic peoples of the eastern Mediterranean like the Phoenetians. The writing was not sacred nor taught in priest schools. But since the number of characters was around 30 instead of hundreds, it was easier for the common folk who had need for such writing to learn such as merchants. The influence for these protoal alphabets did not just come from Egypt. However, in northern Syria, the people of the rich city of Ugarit were inspired by the ununiform script for their letters as they were culturally closer to Mesopotamia. Despite their different origin, the novelty remained the same as did the names of the alphabet. And it is actually from this that we have the first written alphabet song, meaning a representation of the available letters in a row as a kind of show gallery for the new innovation. These lists are called abbisadarians, and initially there were two of them. What we see here is the so-called northern Seemitic Order, first recorded over 3,000 years ago. As to who and why the specific order of this first recorded ordered alphabet, we will never know. But at some point, somebody sat down and wrote out the list and it caught on.

[00:07:27]Fortunately for us and unfortunately for them, their storage house burned down.

[00:07:31]Unlike modern books, which are the first items in the house to fall victim to fire, clay tablets have the great advantage of actually hardening in such a circumstance and surviving for modern archaeologists to find. Yep, modern archaeologists thrive on destruction.

[00:07:43]The more fire and earthquakes, well, the better. If you look closely at this list, you will see it is already in the main familiar order even if the shape of the letters are not the familiar ones.

[00:07:53]So the sound for A and B are at the beginning in the middle third line in the picture L MN are in the expected sequence as well as the letter PQR which are also correct. The alphabet ends with T as the case will be in the latteric alphabets of Aramaic and Hebrew. So despite the fact that the shapes are different, the Egyptian-based alphabet that we examined was transferred to the Greeks almost in the same order before the Greeks did their thing, showing that this convention was followed along the whole of the Cyro Palestinian coast. As to why this particular order, as alluded to, unfortunately, no definitive answers are given. Although theories range from a at the beginning because it's the first sound humans commonly make to because A is the oxad it is in honor of the astrological age of Taurus and it gets crazier from there. Of course, many simply think it was most probably just a list to teach the alphabet initially with the order being jotted down at random and just sort of catching on. For the alphabet order as we know it today, this was just the first step. As for step two, the branch that leads to the Latin alphabet went through the Greeks who were in contact with the Phoenetians. There it underwent yet another transformation, the last big one, and that's the insertion of vowels.

[00:09:06]The alphabet up to that point was used by Seemetic people where the language structure is on some level less dependent on vowels which change within the sentence to indicate various grammatical tenses. The Greeks on the other hand spoke an Indo-Uropean language which like English bases its words on blocks that indicate the grammatical tenses mainly using pre and suffixes. Those languages require the presence of vowels. Furthermore, they needed the letters to distinguish between long vowels and short vowels so that poems and the like were written accurately as by the time alphabetical writing came around in Greece around the 8th century, the hype for poetry was high. Luckily, the Greeks had a solution right in front of them as many of the Phoenician letters they borrowed had sounds that did not exist in Indo-Uropean languages such as the a voiced fingial fricative sound and hats a voiceless fingial frictive being useful leftovers. A was put to represent the sound o and het the eter and so on.

[00:10:04]The Greeks also made additions such as the long O which was called the O mega literally mega O or big O as opposed to the small O or O micron. Also around this time the alphabet gradually turned to face right and not left. So the E and F were facing right and not left as it initially did. The Greeks did keep the names of the letter but helanized them to the alphas, betas, lambdas and most of these other Greek letters which nowadays often appear to be the only thing in common between a frat party and a physics club. So to recap, most of these Greek letters are helenized shapes with names based on cemetic words referring to what some Egyptian hieroglyphs were depicting. We should also explicitly point out here that there was not one Greek alphabet, but many almost every city had its own.

[00:10:50]However, by the fifth century BC, the Ionian version was specifically the one used in Mulletus, which would be established as the main Greek alphabet.

[00:10:58]The cities in the island of Iboa had the alphabet that directly spawns the Latin alphabet as these Greeks were found in colonies in southern Italy. In their alphabet, for example, the K and S combination is written like our letter X. Of course, as a symbol that was added, it went after the T in the alphabet. On that note, as alluded to, initially it was alpha at the beginning and the end was T with then the newly added letters or amendments being tacked on such as the Y and the omega. The first abbisadarium was found at the mount of Himetus in Atica on a bowl shared with the letters alpha beta gamma the ABC from the 8th century the time writing was introduced to the continent.

[00:11:37]The order was apparently popularized and kept as we also find it on another bowl four centuries later around 400 B.CE.

[00:11:44]This time with the complete Greek alphabet one of the earliest complete examples of this nature. And note here comparing to the Latin alphabet at this point the ABCDE E in the beginning or the L MN O are recognizable. This all brings us to step three the Latin alphabet. The Aodian cities Eratria and Chalkus founded Kami, one of the first Greek colonies as early as the 8th century. It can be found far more to the north than most other Greek cities around modern-day Naples and was therefore one of the first to come in contact with Italian civilizations such as the Atruscans to the north of Italy.

[00:12:16]From then the old italic alphabets were developed. The letters as taken by the Ioans evolved in many old italic scripts through the Atruscan into Umbrean and the rat. But of course the most known descendant is the Latin alphabet used in Rome. The most ancient example of the Latin language is an inscription written on a candle holder, the Dunos inscription dating from the 7th to the 5th century B.C.E. However, gradually as the Romans conquered Italy, the other Italian alphabets were marginalized and the mainstream alphabet that we know today was developed. Meanwhile, some of the marginalized alphabets to the north would develop to become the runic alphabets and Vikings being Vikings changed the order for some reason. So, you have the furark runes. In any event, the Romans adapted the alphabet to their own sounds. A legacy of this two-step adaption of the alphabet is seen in the naming of the letters as the Greek names of the letters were in the meantime dropped. Maybe they were seen as just unnecessary. An easy way to differentiate which letter names were in wide use as far back as the Atruscans is to check if the name of a consonant ends with the consonant or begins with it and ends with an open vowel. So M and N were active letters in the Atruscan language which had closed syllables. Latin, however, like Italian today favored open syllables. So when they reintroduced the letters B and D, which the Atruscans seemed not to have used as much, lacking apparently voiced stops in their language, they called them B and D instead of E and E. Also for the K sound, three letters were now used. C before E, Q before U, quis, quantum, and K before A. But quickly K fell out of use again, only appearing in words like ken. Atruscans used to depict both C and G with the letter C since they did not differentiate between them. That's why you sometimes see gas written as kaas.

[00:13:58]The Romans put a line on the C and hence made the G and put it in the alphabet in the place of the Yuboan letter for zed, which they did not need. Finally, the Latin alphabet was completed around the 1st century BC as Latin adopted the Greek letters Y and brought the zed back as they wanted to write Greek loan words such as Zeus when the various philosophical schools were introduced.

[00:14:20]Appropriately, these two letters went to the back of the alphabet. The zed even almost kept its Greek name zeta. Fast forwarding to medieval times, we have now almost reached the modern English alphabet, but some final additions were made. The original V was split into V and U and then W to reflect the emerging sounds brought by the influence of the Germanic languages. These letters took their appropriate place near each other where the Latin V was at the back of the alphabet between the T and the XYZ.

[00:14:48]Similarly, the J is written near the I from which it was spawned. Thus being the only letter which did not fall in line and go to the back of the alphabet, although it was new. Also during the Carolinian Renaissance, the small case minuscule was introduced in the form that we recognize today. And there we have it. While the exact order seems to have been relatively arbitrary other than mostly tacking on new letters near the end when they came about, all the letters were now in place and with the right names, be they very old, very new, very transformed or still quite recognizable. The English alphabet has found its so far final form now easily taught in an all too catchy song. Of course, while not strictly alphabetical, as previously noted, emoticons and emojis have introduced a brand new rapid revolution to written language that for the first time in history allows humans to very effectively do something in writing we've never been able to do before. But for that, you'll have to check out our criminally underviewed video, given how interesting it is, who invented the emotion and emoji, and how they're changing written language for the better.