alphabet

An alphabet is a set of distinguishable characters, e.g. letters, signs, digits and special characters, arranged in an agreed order. The extent of such a character set is usually finite.

As an example the Latin alphabet is quoted, whose letters are subject to an order relation. It begins with the letter "A" and ends with the letter "Z". Another example are the decimal numbers, which begin with the digit "0" and end with "9".

Alphabets are represented as ordered character sets ininformation and communication technology by a code. Typical codes for character sets include ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, ANSI character set.