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A letter is a type of grapheme, the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes, the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words.
In lexicographical order, the word "Thomas" appears before "Thompson" because they first differ at the fifth letter ('a' and 'p'), and letter 'a' comes before the letter 'p' in the alphabet. Because it is the first difference, in this case the 5th letter is the "most significant difference" for alphabetical ordering.
In Pinyin alphabetical order, where words have the same basic letters in pinyin and differ only in modifying diacritics, the unmodified letter comes before the modified letter. For example, e comes before ê (額 ( è ) before 欸 ( ê̄ )), and u comes before and ü (路 ( lù ) before 驢 ( lǘ ) and 努 ( nǔ ) before 女 ( nǚ )).
A language may represent a given phoneme by combinations of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called digraphs, and three-letter groups are called trigraphs. German uses the tetragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the phoneme German pronunciation: and (in a few borrowed words) "dsch" for [dʒ]. [83]
The California Job Case was a compartmentalized box for printing in the 19th century, sizes corresponding to the commonality of letters. The frequency of letters in text has been studied for use in cryptanalysis, and frequency analysis in particular, dating back to the Arab mathematician al-Kindi (c. 801–873 AD), who formally developed the method (the ciphers breakable by this technique go ...
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: palatalization before front vowels of Latin /k/ successively to /tʃ/, /ts/, and finally to Middle French /s/. Affects C.
As a historical dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary features entries in which the earliest ascertainable recorded sense of a word, whether current or obsolete, is presented first, and each additional sense is presented in historical order according to the date of its earliest ascertainable recorded use. [5]
Langenscheidt dictionaries in various languages A multi-volume Latin dictionary by Egidio Forcellini Dictionary definition entries. A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical and stroke for logographic languages), which may include information on definitions ...