Letter (alphabet) of sounds to make words. A letter is classed as either a consonant or a vowel, depending on how its sound is produced (vowels are "a", "e", "i", "o", "u", and sometimes "y" and "w"). The basic Roman alphabet is used by about one hundred languages, with slight variations. Some versions contain as few as twenty-one characters, some as many as thirty. Letters have specific names associated with them, which may differ with language, dialect, and history. "Z", for example, is usually called "zed" in all English-speaking countries except the US, where it is named "zee". As elements of alphabets,
Naming conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet Naming conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) requires specific names for the symbols and diacritics used in the alphabet. It is often desirable to distinguish an IPA symbol from the sound it is intended to represent, since there is not a one-to-one correspondence between symbol and sound in broad transcription. The symbol's names and phonetic descriptions are described in the "Handbook of the International Phonetic Association". The symbols also have nonce names in the Unicode standard. In some cases, the Unicode names and the IPA names do not agree. For example, IPA calls "epsilon", but