Greek alphabet which the sequence of the alphabet could be recited and memorized. In Phoenician, each letter name was a word that began with the sound represented by that letter; thus "ʾaleph", the word for "ox", was used as the name for the glottal stop , "bet", or "house", for the sound, and so on. When the letters were adopted by the Greeks, most of the Phoenician names were maintained or modified slightly to fit Greek phonology; thus, "ʾaleph, bet, gimel" became "alpha, beta, gamma". The Greek names of the following letters are more or less straightforward continuations of their Phoenician antecedents.
History of the Greek alphabet derive from omicron with a line drawn under it. Long and were written with the digraphs "ει" and "ου", respectively, whereas long and short , , were never distinguished in writing. In 403/2 BC, following the devastating defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the restoration of democracy, the Athenians voted to abandon the old Attic alphabet ("Pre-Euclidean alphabet") and to introduce a standardized variant of the eastern Ionic alphabet, after a proposal by archon Eucleides. This Euclidean alphabet included eta and omega, which concluded the process of adapting the Phoenician script so that all vowels could be written systematically, thus