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
Sogdian alphabet as an abjad, but it also displays tendencies towards an alphabet. The script consists of 17 consonants, many of which have alternative forms for initial, middle, and final position. As in the Aramaic alphabet, long vowels were commonly written with matres lectionis, the consonants "aleph", "yodh" and "waw". However, unlike Aramaic and most abjads, these consonant signs would also sometimes serve to express the short vowels (which could also sometimes be left unexpressed as in the parent systems). To disambiguate long vowels from short ones, an additional aleph could be written before the sign denoting the long vowel. The alphabet