History of the Greek alphabet derive from omicron with a line drawn under it. Long and were written with the digraphs "ει" and "ου", respectively, whereas long and short , , were never distinguished in writing. In 403/2 BC, following the devastating defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the restoration of democracy, the Athenians voted to abandon the old Attic alphabet ("Pre-Euclidean alphabet") and to introduce a standardized variant of the eastern Ionic alphabet, after a proposal by archon Eucleides. This Euclidean alphabet included eta and omega, which concluded the process of adapting the Phoenician script so that all vowels could be written systematically, thus
Greek alphabet Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the first alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many different local variants, but, by the end of the fourth century BC, the Eucleidean alphabet, with twenty-four letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used to write Greek today. These twenty-four letters