Different alphabets are used over the world:      Latin Alphabet      Cyrillic alphabet      Arabic alphabet      Brahmic alphabets      Mixed: Latin and Cyrilic Alphabet      Mixed: Latin and Arabic Alphabet      Mixed: no alphabet and other alphabet      Other alphabet      Non-alphabetic writing systems

Venn diagram which shows that 11 characters are common to the Greek, Latin and Russian alphabets (upper case letters)

An alphabet is a writing system, a list of symbols for writing. The basic symbols in an alphabet are called letters. In an alphabet, each letter is a symbol for a sound or related sounds. To make the alphabet work better, more signs assist the reader: punctuation marks, spaces, standard reading direction, and so on.

The name alphabet comes from Aleph and Beth, the first two letters in the Phoenician alphabet.