The word alphabet is derived from the first two letters of the
Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. We owe our own alphabet to the
Phoenicians. Their 22 letter alphabet had no vowels, but it was
used as the basis of the ancient Greek alphabet, which in turn
was adapted by the Romans, and is essentially the same as the
one we use today.
A sentence that
contains all 26 letters of the alphabet is called a pangram.
Ernest Vincent Wright's
novel Gadsby: Champion of Youth (1939) - a story of more than
50,000 words in which the letter ‘e’ never appears. George
Perec’s novel La Disparition (1969) which doesn’t contain the
letter ‘e’. Its English translation, A Void by Gilbert Adair,
also avoids using the letter ‘e’ which is the most common letter
in both languages.
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