An alphabet is a standard set of letters (basic written symbols or graphemes) which is used to write one or more languages based on the general principle that the letters represent phonemes (basic significant sounds) of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as syllabaries (in which each character represents a syllable) and logographies (in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit).

The Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is the first fully phonemic script. Thus the Phoenician alphabet is considered to be the first alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and possibly Brahmic. According to terminology introduced by Peter T. Daniels, an "alphabet" is a script that represents both vowels and consonants as letters equally. In this narrow sense of the word the first "true" alphabet was the Greek alphabet, which was developed on the basis of the earlier Phoenician alphabet. In other alphabetic scripts such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants; such a script is also called an abjad. A third type, called abugida or alphasyllabary, is one where vowels are shown by diacritics or modifications of consonantal base letters, as in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts.

Latin script, or Roman script, is a set of graphic signs (script) based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, a form of the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet. It is used as the standard method of writing in most Western and Central European languages, as well as many languages from other parts of the world. Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system and is the most widely adopted writing system in the world (commonly used by about 70% of the world's population). It is also the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The 26 most widespread letters are the letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

Name

The script is either called Roman script or Latin script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome. In the context of transliteration the term "romanization" or "romanisation" is often found.Unicode uses the term "Latin" as does the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

The numeral system is called Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements Roman numerals.