“The Greeks adopted the Phoenecian alphabet (also known as the North Semitic alphabet) of twenty-two to thirty letters and called them by such words as alpha, beta, and gamma, which are phonetic imitations of important Semitic words, names in most cases: aleph (ox), beth (house), and gimel (camel). To these they added two letters supposedly signifying female and male genitalia—delta and phi.

In a stroke of genius, the Greeks decided to replace some of the Phoenician syllable letters with vowel sounds, thus producing the first purely phonetic, and true, alphabet, composed entirely of vowels and consonants. The Greek alphabet spread throughout the European world, undergoing minor changes, and gave birth to the Etruscan alphabet and then to the Roman.

In giving the letters Latin names, the Romans introduced the alphabet that is in use among Western nations today. The Latin alphabet had only twenty letters, the present English alphabet minus j, k, v, w, y, and z. The Romans added k for use in abbreviations and y and z to transcribe Greek words, producing a twenty-three letter alphabet.

After being adopted by English-speaking peoples, the alphabet gained its final three letters: w arose from a doubling, or formation of a ligature, of u, and j and v as consonant variants of the vowels i and u.”

—Charles Panati, The Browser’s Book of Beginnings, 1984.