History of the Greek alphabet consonant letter, rather than seemingly have two exceptions in spelling. Greek, like Phoenician, made a distinction for vowel length; indeed, Greek had five short vowels and seven long vowels, but only five vowel letters. As in Phoenician, the difference in length was not originally made in writing. However, by the 6th century BC the letter eta (not needed for a consonant in eastern dialects of Greek, which lacked ) came to stand for the long vowel , and a new letter, omega, was developed for long . The provenance of omega is not known, but it is generally assumed to
Letter (alphabet) text than serif faces. Without serifs, an uppercase "I" () is indistinguishable from a lowercase "l" (). The average distribution of letters, or the relative frequency of each letter's occurrence in text in a given language, can be obtained by analyzing large amounts of representative text. This information can be useful in cryptography and for other purposes, such as song lyrics. Letter frequencies vary in different types of writing. Letter (alphabet) A letter is a grapheme (written character) in an alphabetic system of writing. It is a visual representation of the smallest unit of spoken sound. Letters broadly correspond to