Where did the word "alphabet" come from?
Although there are already 2 correct answers, I'd like to add a few points.
But first I'd like to recommend the very informative and very accessible booklet "The Early Alphabet - available on Google book" at least partially - of which I drew the following bullet points.
- The letter alpha originally represented a cow head. If you imagine a capital A upside down, you'll see that it's pretty close. It's Phoenician name was alf which meant "Ox". Hence the Greek "alpha".
- The letter beta was originally a house (actually the bird's eye view of a square house). In most Semitic languages the word for house is pronounced "Beth, Bayt...". Hence the Greek "beta".
- Gamma is a camel,
- Delta a door,
Epsilon a window etc...
The order of the letters (all consonants and actually shorthand for syllabaries) was actually fixed very early. One of the earliest of these abecedaries is actually still written in cuneiforms (a syllabic writing system) and is more than 3200 years old.
Yes, it is true. Etymonline.com says:
560s (implied in alphabetical), from L.L. alphabetum (Tertullian), from Gk. alphabetos, from alpha + beta.
Alpha is the first letter in the Greek "alphabet", and Beta is the second.
The alphabet entry in Etymonline includes:
1560s (implied in alphabetical), from L.L. alphabetum (Tertullian), from Gk. alphabetos, from alpha + beta.
The Wiktionary entry for alphabet also adds:
... Ancient Greek ἀλφάβητος (alphabētos), from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha (Α) and beta (Β), from Phoenician aleph (“ox”) and beth (“house”), so called because they were pictograms of those objects.