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,
Telegraph code Telegraph code A telegraph code is one of the character encodings used to transmit information through telegraphy machines. The most famous such code is Morse code. Morse code can be transmitted and received with very simple electrical equipment, such as the electrical telegraph invented in 1816. Morse code represents each letter of the alphabet as a series of "dots and dashes" (short and long bursts of electronically-generated noise). The speed of sending is directly related to the length of the shortest (dot) element: a dash is three dots long, an inter-character gap is the same length (3 dots), and inter-word