The alphabet used to have other letters -- meet two | Dictionary.com Blog
October 11, 2010 by:  Dictionary.com 449 Comments
The English alphabet , as you likely know, is made up of 26 letters.
But it wasn’t always that way.
Before we get to which letters were late additions, let’s explain a bit about Old English . English was first written in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, also known as Anglo-Saxon. The Angles and Saxons came from Germany and settled in Britain in the fifth century. The region they inhabited became known as “ Angle-land ,” or “ England .”
Eventually, Christian missionaries introduced the Latin alphabet , which ultimately replaced Anglo-Saxon. But for some time, the alphabet included the letters of the Latin alphabet, some symbols (like the ampersand ), and some letters of Old English .
As Modern English evolved, the Old English letters were dropped or replaced.
(Our trusty alphabet isn’t the only part of language that has changed — October used to be the eighth month, and September the seventh . What happened? Find out here .)
Here’s an example: In Old English, a letter called “ thorn ” represented the “th” sound (as in “that”) in Modern English. In the Latin alphabet, the “ y ” was the symbol that most closely resembled the character that represented thorn. So, thorn was dropped and “y” took its place. (But is “y” a vowel or a consonant ? We explore the dilemma here .)
That is why the word “ ye ,” as in “Ye Olde Booke Shoppe,” is an archaic spelling of “the.”
The Old English letter “ wynn ” was replaced by “uu,” which eventually developed into the modern w . (It really is a double u.)
The letters “ u ” and “ j ” didn’t join what we know as the alphabet until the sixteenth century.