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
Letter (alphabet) 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 phonemes in the spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent, exact correspondence between letters and phonemes. Written signs in other writing systems are called syllabograms (which denote a syllable) or logograms (which indicate a word or phrase). The contemporary English-language alphabet, known as Roman style, consists of twenty-six letters. Each letter corresponds to one or more sounds, and the letters are combined in the order