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
Romic alphabet their English "short" sounds when written singly, and their "long" sounds when doubled: Sweet adopted from Ellis and earlier philologists a method creating new letters by rotating existing ones, as in this way no new type would need to be cast: The IPA letter acquired its modern pronunciation and first use with this alphabet. He resurrected three Anglo-Saxon letters, ash , eth and thorn , the first two of which had the pronunciations they retain in the IPA. The consonants were as follows by 1892: The vowels were as follows by 1892. In "wide" vowels, the tongue is described as