English alphabet 24 letters of the Latin alphabet first (including ampersand), then 5 additional English letters, starting with the Tironian note "ond" (⁊), an insular symbol for "and": In the orthography of Modern English, thorn (þ), eth (ð), wynn (ƿ), yogh (), ash (æ), and ethel (œ) are obsolete. Latin borrowings reintroduced homographs of ash and ethel into Middle English and Early Modern English, though they are largely obsolete (see "Ligatures in recent usage" below), and where they are used they are not considered to be separate letters (e.g. for collation purposes), but rather ligatures. Thorn and eth were both replaced by
English alphabet however, have a number of digraphs. The alphabet's current form originated from Latin script about the 7th century. Since then, various letters have been added, or removed, to give the current Modern English alphabet of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form: The alphabet was derived from an original series of sixteen characters, that emerged as a way to record spoken words. The English language itself was first written in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, in use from the 5th century. This alphabet was brought to what is now England, along with the proto-form of the language itself,