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 As in Phoenician, the difference in length was not originally made in writing.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
Alphabet a new letter ՈՒ ու (which was a digraph before). The Armenian word for "alphabet" is "" (), named after the first two letters of the Armenian alphabet Ա այբ ayb and Բ բեն ben. The Armenian script's directionality is horizontal left-to-right, like the Latin and Greek alphabets. Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters, which can then be used for purposes of collation—namely for the listing of words and other items in what is called "alphabetical order". The basic ordering of the Latin alphabet (A B C D E F G H I