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A letter can be different things:
- A piece of paper with writing, which we send to other people, often by post (mail).
- Mary sent Andrew a letter saying "thank you".
- In some languages, for example English, we write a "letter" for all the sounds of the alphabet: when we write A, B, C, D etc, these are letters, or "letters of the alphabet".
- Jenny has learned three letters of the alphabet at school.
- Please write your name in big letters.
- In the USA, "letters" are also letters of the alphabet which people put on sports clothes. They show that the person is in a school sports team.
There is a paper format called Letter or US Letter. It is mainly used in the United States (see Paper size). Most other countries use the DIN paper sizes. The most common DIN paper size is A4.
Letters of the alphabet
| The Latin alphabet | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | ||
| Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj |
| Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp |
| Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | |
| Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | ||
In some languages, for example English, we write a "letter" for all the sounds of the alphabet: when we write A, B, C, D etc, these are letters, or "letters of the alphabet". Other languages do not use letters for writing: Chinese, for example, uses "ideograms".
In English and many other languages, the smallest part of writing is the letter. We use letters to make words. In some languages, for example Spanish, there is usually one letter for one sound (or better: for one phoneme, the smallest part of speech). This is easy to read. In other languages, for example English, we can use several letters for one sound, or one letter for several sounds. This is difficult for learners to read. Here are some examples:
- Spanish: feliz has 5 letters and 5 sounds.
- English: happy has 5 letters and 4 sounds.
- In English we use the "a" in "happy" for three sounds:
- a = /æ/ (pad) OR /ɑ/ (bar) OR /Ej/ (cake)
- In Spanish we use the "a" for one sound:
- a = /a/ (gato)
English, French, Spanish and many other languages use the Latin alphabet for writing. In this alphabet there are often two different letters for a sound. For example, "A" and "a". In other alphabets, for example the Cyrillic alphabet, there is only one letter for a sound.
- Latin alphabet: D d
- Cyrillic alphabet: Д д
