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 is a ligature for the letters "Et". In English and many other languages it is used to represent the word "and" and occasionally the Latin word "et", as in the abbreviation "&c" (et cetera). The apostrophe, while not considered part of the English alphabet, is used to contract English words. A few pairs of words, such as "its" (belonging to "it") and "it's" ("it is" or "it has"), "were" (form of 'to be') and "we're" (we are), and "shed" (to get rid of) and "she'd" ("she would" or "she had") are distinguished in writing only by the presence or absence