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 and "ex", in "-es" ("aitches, esses, exes"). Plurals of vowels end in "-es" ("aes, ees, ies, oes, ues"); these are rare. All letters may stand for themselves, generally in capitalized form ("okay" or "OK", "emcee" or "MC"), and plurals may be based on these ("aes" or "As", "cees" or "Cs", etc.") The names of the letters are for the most part direct descendants, via French, of the Latin (and Etruscan) names. (See Latin alphabet: Origins.) The regular phonological developments (in rough chronological order) are: The novel forms are "aitch", a regular development of Medieval Latin "acca"; "jay", a new letter