UU, or u, is the twenty-first and sixth-to-last letter and fifth vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages, and others worldwide. Its name in English is u (pronounced 'juː), plural ues. U derives from the Semitic waw, as does F, and later, Y, W, and V. Its oldest ancestor goes to Egyptian hieroglyphics, and is probably from a hieroglyph of a mace or fowl, representing the sound v or the sound w.
HH, or h, is the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, including the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is aitch (pronounced eɪtʃ, plural aitches), or regionally haitch heɪtʃ. The original Semitic letter Heth most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (ħ). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts. The Greek Eta 'Η' in archaic Greek alphabets, before coming to represent a long vowel, /ɛː/, still represented a similar sound, the voiceless glottal fricative /h/.
ZZ, or z, is the 26th and last letter of the Latin alphabet, as used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its usual names in English are zed ('zɛd) and zee ('ziː), with an occasional archaic variant izzard ('ɪzərd). In most English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom, the letter's name is zed zɛd, reflecting its derivation from the Greek letter zeta (this dates to Latin, which borrowed Y and Z from Greek), but in American English its name is zee ziː, analogous to the names for B, C, D, etc.
GraphemeIn linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word grapheme is derived and the suffix -eme by analogy with phoneme and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called graphemics. The concept of graphemes is abstract and similar to the notion in computing of a character. By comparison, a specific shape that represents any particular grapheme in a given typeface is called a glyph. There are two main opposing grapheme concepts.
NN, or n, is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is en (pronounced 'ɛn), plural ens. One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like the English , because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet. It is speculated by many that Semitic speakers working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphics to create the first alphabet, and that they used the same snake symbol to represent N, because their word for "snake" may have begun with that sound.
Sha (Cyrillic)Sha or Shu (Ш ш; italics: Ш ш) is a letter of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts. It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/. More precisely, the sound in Russian denoted by ш is commonly transcribed as a palatoalveolar fricative but is actually a voiceless retroflex fricative. It is used in every variation of the Cyrillic alphabet for Slavic and non-Slavic languages. In English, Sha is romanized as sh or as š, the latter being the equivalent letter in the Latin alphabets of Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Latvian and Lithuanian.
WW, or w, is the twenty-third and fourth-to-last letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. It represents a consonant, but in some languages it represents a vowel. Its name in English is double-u, plural double-ues. The classical Latin alphabet, from which the modern European alphabets derived, did not have the "W" character. The "W" sounds were represented by the Latin letter "V" (at the time, not yet distinct from "U").
UpsilonUpsilon (ˈʌpsɪˌlɒn,ˈ(j)uːp-,-lən, UKalso(j)uːpˈsaɪlən,ʊp-,-lɒn; uppercase Υ, lowercase υ; ýpsilon ˈipsilon) or ypsilon Ip- is the twentieth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, Υʹ has a value of 400. It is derived from the Phoenician waw . The name of the letter was originally just "υ" (y; also called hy, hence "hyoid", meaning "shaped like the letter υ"), but the name changed to "υ ψιλόν" u psilon 'simple u' to distinguish it from οι, which had come to have the same [y] pronunciation.
OmicronOmicron (ˈoʊmᵻkrɒn,_ˈɒmᵻkrɒn,_oʊˈmaɪkrɒn; uppercase Ο, lowercase ο, όμικρον) is the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. This letter is derived from the Phoenician letter ayin: . In classical Greek, omicron represented the close-mid back rounded vowel o in contrast to omega which represented the open-mid back rounded vowel ɔː and the digraph ου which represented the long close-mid back rounded vowel oː. In modern Greek, both omicron and omega represent the mid back rounded vowel o̞ or ɔ̝.
AA, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is a (pronounced 'eɪ), plural aes. It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ.
