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 words without vowels the nth degree", is in fairly common usage. Another mathematical term without vowel letters is "rng" , derived from "ring" by deleting the letter . A more obscure example is "ln". Vowelless proper names from other languages, such as the surname Ng, may retain their original spelling, even if they are pronounced with vowels. In the Middle English period, there were no standard spellings, but was sometimes used to represent either a vowel or a consonant sound in the same way that Modern English does with , particularly during the 14th and 15th centuries. This vocalic generally represented , as