In fact, abecedarian was spelled “ABCdarian” in 17th century English. AbecedarianĪnyone who learns or teaches the alphabet is an abecedarian, a word appropriately derived from the first three letters of the alphabet. And if you’re abarstic, then you have an insatiable appetite. Abarcyĭerived from a Greek word meaning “bread,” abarcy is insatiableness. You can expect it to account for roughly 8 percent of all the language on a typical page of English text, as well as almost the same amount of words in a standard dictionary-including the 39 amazing A words amassed here. Today, A is usually said to be the third-most frequently used letter in the English alphabet (behind E and either T or S, depending on which sample you use). And it’s from there, via Latin, that A ended up in English. The Phoenicians then took on this Egyptian ox symbol and simplified it enormously (into their vaguely triangular letter aleph, which resembled a modern letter A that had fallen on its side) before the Greeks got hold of that and turned it into their initial letter, alpha. Turn an uppercase A on its side so that its closed top is pointing to the left and you might be able to see where the letter itself originated. Its earliest ancestor was probably an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an ox’s head, and the ox’s two horns are what gave our letter A what is now its two pointed legs.
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