Why alphabets starts from a

As RD. As for exactly how the alphabet ended up in the A to Z order that we memorize in school, it's still a bit of a mystery, but a very old mystery. As Mental Floss points out , the run of letters "abcdef" has been the same for thousands of years as you can see in this very helpful animation from the University of Maryland.

Some scholars think it goes back to the Egyptians and how they ordered their hieroglyphics. Another theory is that the letters used to have a number attached to them, and they were put in numerical order.

While the numbers were lost over time, the letters and their order remain. Psychology Today posts that it had something to do with how easy it is to memorize with its bouncy cadence. Another theory is that the letters were put in order as part of a memory tool so people could memorize all 26 of them.

Although the order of alphabetical characters has been established for so long, putting words into alphabetical order has been perfected relatively recently. In medieval times this usually consisted of simply putting together all the words beginning with a , followed by all those with b , and so on. Strict alphabetical order did not become established until after the advent of printing. Words can be alphabetized in two ways, known respectively as word-by-word and letter-by-letter. In the former, a shorter word will precede all other words beginning with the same sequence of letters, even if the word is followed by another word.

In letter-by-letter alphabetization, with characters are considered as a single sequence, with any hyphens and spaces ignored. The alphabet, as best as historians can tell, got its start in ancient Egypt sometime in the Middle Bronze Age, but not with the Egyptians. They were, at the time, writing with a set of hieroglyphs that were used both as representations of the consonants of their language and as logographs a logograph or logogram is a letter, symbol, or sign used to represent an entire word.

It was either Canaanite workers living on the Sinai Peninsula in the 19th century BC or Semitic workers living in Central Egypt in the 15th century BC who created the first purely alphabetic script. Over the next few centuries, this alphabet spread through the rest of the Middle East and into Europe. Almost all subsequent alphabets in the Western world have either descended from it, or been inspired by or adapted from one of its descendants.

The first people to extensively use the alphabet as it emerged from Egypt were the Phoenicians, who ruled a small empire of maritime city-states and colonies around the Mediterranean. Their extensive use of the alphabet in business dealings throughout their vast trade network led to its quick spread throughout the Mediterranean region — later versions were called the Phoenician alphabet. The Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet sometime in the 8th century BC or earlier, keeping the order and adapting it for use with their own language.

For example, the Phoenician alphabet did not have letters representing vowel sounds, which were important in the Greek language and had to be added. After they had worked out the finer points of their new alphabet, Greeks living on the Italian peninsula came in contact with a tribe known as the Latins. Sometime in the 5th century BC, the tribe adopted writing from the Greeks and another tribe called the Etruscans, choosing and mixing letters from the two alphabets as they needed.

The Latins would expand in population, geographic size, and cultural influence over the centuries, creating a little empire called Rome. As they conquered most of Europe, the Romans took their alphabet with them and spread it to new lands.