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.
Letter (alphabet) and order of appearance correspond closely. The Greek alphabet, adapted around 800 BCE, added four letters. This was the first alphabet assigning letters not only to consonant sounds, but also to vowels. The Roman Empire brought the development and refinement of our Roman alphabet, beginning around 500 BCE. The Romans added or dropped certain letters to accommodate Greek and Etruscan words; they also experimented with styles such as cursive when writing in ink. By about the fifth century CE, the beginnings of lowercase letterforms began to emerge in Roman writing, but they did not come into common use until the