English Alphabet & Symbols

The English alphabet has 26 letters: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z, each with a capital and a small form (a b c … z). Five are vowel letters, A, E, I, O and U, and Y works as a vowel too in words like gym, myth and happy. The last letter is zee in American English and zed in Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia and most other Commonwealth countries.

English is one of the few major European languages that writes its own words with no accent marks at all, so the plain 26 letters cover almost everything. They are not used equally: E is the most common letter in English text, while J, Q, X and Z are the rarest. The sentence The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog uses every one of them, which is why it is used to show off fonts and test keyboards.

The alphabet was not always 26. I and J were once two shapes of one letter, as were U and V; printers began treating them as separate letters in the 1500s and 1600s, and some dictionaries still filed I and J words together long after that. W got its name, double u, because scribes wrote it as two u's side by side.

English alphabet with accents: do any English words have accents?

Yes, a few, and almost all of them are borrowed. English keeps the marks in some words from French (é in café, cliché, fiancée, résumé; è in crème; ê in crêpe; à in à la carte; ç in façade), from Spanish (ñ in jalapeño, piñata) and from German (ü in über). Over time most of them lose the accent: cafe, cliche and facade are standard spellings too.

Writers tend to keep the mark where it tells two words apart: résumé (a CV) and resume (to continue), exposé (a revealing report) and expose. The two dots of the diaeresis show that a vowel is said separately rather than merged with the one before it: ï in naïve, ë in names like Zoë and Brontë. The New Yorker magazine famously still writes coöperate and reëlect this way.

Older English spellings also used the joined letters æ and œ in words and names such as encyclopædia, Cæsar, manœuvre and Œdipus. Today the ligatures are usually written as ae or oe; American English uses e in corresponding spellings such as encyclopedia and estrogen.

English punctuation marks: quotes, apostrophe, dashes and &

Printed English uses curly quotation marks: “ ” double and ‘ ’ single. American style puts double quotes on the outside and single quotes for a quote inside a quote; British publishers often do the reverse. The apostrophe in it’s, don’t and rock ’n’ roll is the same character as the closing single quote, ’. The straight marks " and ' come from the typewriter; they are fine in code and plain text, while books and websites usually prefer the curly ones.

The em dash — marks a break or an aside — like this — and the shorter en dash – joins ranges: 1914–1918, pages 10–20, London–Paris. Both are longer than the hyphen on the keyboard. The ellipsis … is one character standing for three dots.

The ampersand & began as a joined-up Latin et (and). Schoolchildren once recited it at the end of the alphabet as "X, Y, Z, and per se and", meaning "and, by itself, and", and that phrase ran together into the word ampersand. The interrobang ‽, a question mark and exclamation mark in one, was invented in 1962 by the American advertising executive Martin K. Speckter for questions like You did what‽

Historical English letters and forms: þ ð ƿ ȝ æ ſ

Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, had letters that modern English lost. Þ þ (thorn) and Ð ð (eth) both wrote the th sound, and scribes used them interchangeably. Ƿ ƿ (wynn) wrote w; after the Norman Conquest, the continental uu spelling was introduced and developed into the letter w, which replaced wynn. Æ æ (ash) wrote the vowel of cat.

Thorn lasted longest. In early printing, y sometimes stood in for thorn þ, whose shape could resemble y; in Ye Olde Shoppe, ye was read as the. Ȝ ȝ (yogh) wrote sounds now spelled gh and y, as in niȝt (night); in Scottish names it was later printed as z, which is why Menzies is traditionally said "Mingis".

The long s ſ was not a separate letter but a form of s used at the start and in the middle of words until around 1800, so the US Bill of Rights speaks of Congreſs. It looks like an f, which is why old books seem to talk about "fome" things. Icelandic still writes þ and ð every day; see the Icelandic letters page.

How to type accents, curly quotes and dashes in English

On Windows, hold Alt and type the code on the number pad: 0233 é, 0201 É, 0232 è, 0234 ê, 0235 ë, 0239 ï, 0246 ö, 0252 ü, 0231 ç, 0241 ñ, 0224 à, 0230 æ, 0156 œ, 0254 þ, 0240 ð; 0151 — and 0150 –; 0147 “, 0148 ”, 0145 ‘, 0146 ’; 0133 …; 0163 £ and 0128 €. With the US-International layout, type ' then e for é, " then i for ï, ~ then n for ñ, and AltGr + T gives þ.

On a Mac, Option + E then the letter gives the acute (é), Option + ` the grave (è, à), Option + U the two dots (ë, ï, ö, ü), Option + I the circumflex (ê), Option + N then n gives ñ and Option + C gives ç. Option + Shift + - types —, Option + - types –, Option + ; types …, Option + [ and Option + Shift + [ type “ and ”, and Option + 3 types £ on a US keyboard.

On phones, long-press a letter to see its accented forms (hold e for é è ê ë) and long-press the hyphen for – and —; iPhone's Smart Punctuation can convert straight quotes to curly ones when enabled. In HTML, the entities é, —, –, “, ”, ’, …, & and þ give é — – “ ” ’ … & þ.

Where English is spoken

CLDR estimates that about 1.7 billion people speak English, counting those who use it as a second language. The largest groups are in the United States (about 330 million), India (about 270 million), Pakistan and Nigeria (about 125 million each), the Philippines (about 75 million) and the United Kingdom (about 67 million), followed by Canada, Australia and South Africa; Ireland and New Zealand are English-speaking too. Many more learn it at school: Germany alone counts about 54 million English speakers in the same estimate. Money is written $ in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, £ in the UK, € in Ireland, ₹ in India, ₨ in Pakistan, ₦ in Nigeria and ₱ in the Philippines.

English is a Germanic language. Its nearest relatives are Scots, which grew from the same Old English roots, and Western Frisian, the closest relative on the continent, followed by Dutch, Low German and German; much of its vocabulary, though, came later from French and Latin. English-based creoles and pidgins such as Jamaican Creole, Nigerian Pidgin and Tok Pisin have their own pages, as do Irish and Welsh, the Celtic languages spoken alongside English in Ireland and Wales.