Phoenician Alphabet Table
| Letter | Name | Meaning | Sound | Translit. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 𐤀 | Alp | ox, head of cattle | [ʔ] | ʔ/ʾ |
| 𐤁 | Bet | house | [b] | b |
| 𐤂 | Gaml | throwing stick (or camel) | [ɡ] | g |
| 𐤃 | Dalt | door (or fish) | [d] | d |
| 𐤄 | He | window | [h] | h |
| 𐤅 | Waw | hook | [w] | w |
| 𐤆 | Zen | weapon | [z] | z |
| 𐤇 | Het | courtyard/<wbr />wall<ref name="he-het">The letters he and ḥēt continue three Proto-Sinaitic letters, ḥasir "courtyard", hillul "jubilation" and ḫayt "thread". | [ħ] | ħ/ḥ |
| 𐤈 | Tet | wheelefn|The glyph was taken to represent a wheel, but it possibly derives from the hieroglyph nefer hieroglyph 𓄤 and would originally have been called tab טוב 'good'. | [tʼ] | ṭ |
| 𐤉 | Yod | arm, hand | [j] | j |
| 𐤊 | Kap | palm of a hand | [k] | k |
| 𐤋 | Lamd | goad | [l] | l |
| 𐤌 | Mem | water | [m] | m |
| 𐤍 | Nun | serpent (or fish)efn|the letter name nūn is a word for "fish", but the glyph is presumably from the depiction of a snake, which would point to an original name נחש "snake". | [n] | n |
| 𐤎 | Samk | pillar(?) | [s] | s |
| 𐤏 | En | eye | [ʕ] | ʕ/ʿ |
| 𐤐 | Pe | mouth (or corner) | [p] | p |
| 𐤑 | Sade | papyrus plant/<wbr />fish hook? | [t͡sʼ] | ṣ |
| 𐤒 | Qop | monkey/ | [kʼ] | ḳ/q |
| 𐤓 | Rosh | head | [r] | r |
| 𐤔 | Shin | tooth (or sun) | [ʃ] | š |
| 𐤕 | Taw | mark | [t] | t |
Every time you write the word 'alphabet', you are speaking Phoenician. The first two letters of this 22-consonant chart - alp (ox) and bet (house) - walked into Greek as alpha and beta, and Greek gave them to every European language. Phoenician itself was codified around 1050 BC by the traders of Tyre, Sidon and Byblos, who needed an unambiguous, easy-to-learn script for commerce across the Mediterranean - and its genius was ruthless simplification: take the Egyptian hieroglyphic heritage, strip it to 22 pure consonants, each a simple line-drawing of the word it was named after, and let the reader supply the vowels. Traders taught it in ports from Gibraltar to Syria, and everywhere it landed it mutated into a child script: Hebrew and Arabic kept the consonant-only logic; Greek broke it by inventing vowel letters; and Greek's children - Latin included - carried the result across the world.
Our chart shows all 22 letters with their names and the concrete nouns those names mean: alp 'ox, head of cattle', bet 'house', gaml 'throwing stick (or camel)', shin 'tooth (or sun)', taw 'mark'. These are not decorations - they are the memory of the alphabet's own ancestry in Egyptian hieroglyphs and Proto-Sinaitic signs, where each letter was still a picture of its word. Say the names in order and you recite a little picture-book of a Bronze Age world: ox, house, stick, door, hook, snake, fish, eye, mouth... which is why scholars can reconstruct the letters' shapes from their names alone. The letterforms below are the standard Unicode rendering of the Phoenician block, verified letter by letter against the source tables.
How to use
- Read each row as: letter, name, what the name means, how it sounded, how scholars transliterate it. The sound column is the Classical Phoenician value; the transliteration column shows the conventional Latin letter plus, where relevant, the diacritic form (aleph is ʔ/ʺ - the glottal catch English hides in the middle of 'uh-oh'). If you know Hebrew, read the transliteration column as Hebrew - the 22 letters map one-to-one onto the Hebrew alphabet in the same order, name for name (alp-aleph, bet-bet, gaml-gimel); if you know Greek, read the names as the letter names you already say (alp-alpha, dallet-delta, rosh-rho).
- Watch what the missing vowels do. Phoenician writes ktb and the reader decides from context whether it means 'he wrote', 'she writes' or 'to write' - which sounds like chaos until you notice English does the same with 'read' (present or past?) and Hebrew and Arabic speakers still read this way daily in their Phoenician-descended abjads. The system works because Semitic roots are three-consonant skeletons (k-t-b for everything related to writing), so the consonants carry the dictionary and the vowels carry the grammar. When Greek borrowed the script for a language with different roots, that economy collapsed - and the Greeks brilliantly recycled the consonant letters they didn't need (aleph, he, yodh, ayin, vav) as pure vowels. Our chart's aleph with its glottal-stop sound is exactly the letter that became A.
- Trace the descendants on this site. From this single chart you can reach everything: Hebrew kept all 22 letters, same order, same names (see the Hebrew alphabet table); Arabic kept the order in its own style (the abjad order survives in the mnemonic abjad hawwaz); Aramaic softened the shapes, Syriac stylized the Aramaic, and the Mongol script descended from Syriac is still written vertically in Ulaanbaatar; Greek added vowels, Etruscans carried Greek to Italy, and Latin froze twenty-three of those letters into the shapes on your keyboard. The Phoenician chart is not one alphabet among many - it is the trunk of the tree every other alphabet table on this site hangs from.
Frequently asked questions
Who invented the Phoenician alphabet?
No single inventor is recorded - it is the collaborative codification of centuries of Canaanite experimentation. The deep ancestry runs through Egyptian hieroglyphs into the Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite scripts (c. 1900-1400 BC), where Semitic-speaking miners and traders adapted Egyptian signs acrophonically: the hieroglyph for 'house' got the name bet from the Semitic word for house, and eventually only the consonant b survived. What the Phoenicians contributed, by around 1050 BC, was standardization: a fixed 22-letter order, stable letterforms, and a trading network that taught it everywhere their ships docked. The oldest firmly dated Phoenician inscription is the Ahiram sarcophagus from Byblos (c. 1050 BC); within three centuries the Greeks were adapting it, and Byblos itself gave its name to the book - biblos - that writing would fill.
Why only 22 letters, and why no vowels?
Because Semitic languages make vowels grammatically predictable, and consonants are where the meaning lives. In Phoenician's cousin languages, nearly every word grows from a three-consonant root (k-t-b 'write', m-l-k 'rule'), so 22 consonant letters cover the dictionary; vowels only inflect the root (kataba 'he wrote', kutiba 'it was written') and a fluent reader reconstructs them instantly. Writing them would have been redundancy - and for traders, redundancy cost time and papyrus. The system is still perfectly alive: Hebrew and Arabic readers today parse unvoweled newspapers exactly the way Phoenicians parsed their contracts. The Greek revolution was to realize that a language without consonantal roots needs those five surplus letters as vowels - and with that one edit, the alphabet became universal, capable of recording any language on Earth.
How did the letter shapes evolve into our A, B, C?
By rotation, stylization and a change of writing direction. Phoenician was often written right-to-left (or boustrophedon, turning at line-ends like a plough); the Greeks settled on left-to-right and mirrored the letters in the process - Phoenician alp, an ox-head that faced left, flipped to become A. The Etruscans carried the Greek shapes to Italy, where Latin rounded and stabilized them; the ox's horns over the centuries softened into the crossbar of our A. Bet, the two-room house plan, became B through Greek beta and Etruscan hands. Gaml the throwing stick curved into C (and, with a spur added by Spurius Carvilius Ruga around 230 BC, into G). The great simplification: each hop - Phoenician to Greek to Etruscan to Latin - redrew the picture a little more abstractly, until the drawing was lost and only the letter remained.
What does 'Phoenician' even mean - were the letters purple?
The name is Greek for 'purple people' - phoinikes - probably from the famous Tyrian purple dye the Phoenicians extracted from murex sea snails and sold across the ancient world at extravagant prices. Whether the Greeks named the nation after the dye or the word came from another root is debated, but the connection stuck: the people who sold the costliest color in antiquity also sold the alphabet, and by coincidence their alphabet is the reason the word 'bibliography', 'Bible' and 'book' all trace to Byblos, the port that shipped papyrus. The letters themselves are the more durable commodity: the purple faded, the alphabet went everywhere.
Is Phoenician the same as the Hebrew or Arabic alphabet?
Same family, different generations - cousins, not identities. Phoenician is the shared ancestor: Hebrew preserves all 22 letters in the same order with the same names (alp/aleph, bet/bet...), and Arabic's earliest order (the abjad order, not today's alphabetical order) preserves the same sequence in Arabic dress; both are living Semitic languages whose consonantal logic kept the abjad design honest. Aramaic - the sibling that became the administrative language of the Persian Empire - softened the letterforms and, in its Syriac stage, spawned the line that runs to Mongolian. Greek took the third path: same letters, new principle (vowels). So the honest family picture is: Phoenician is the parent, Hebrew and Arabic are children who stayed home, Greek is the child who moved away and changed everything, and our Syriac, Hebrew and Arabic charts all show the same 22-consonant skeleton wearing different clothes.