An alphabet is a set of characters (literals, figures, other symbols) together with a strict ordering (denoted by <) of this set. For good reasons it is usually required that a set of alphabetic characters has at least two elements and that it is finite. An alphabet Z of n elements is denoted Z n , the order is usually the one of the listing.
Z26 = {a, b,c,..., x,y,z} is the common alphabet of Latin letters of present days. In former times and cultures, the Latin letter alphabet was smaller, so
Z21 = Z26 {j, k, w, x, y} in Italian until about 1925,
Z24 = Z26 {k, w} in Spanish until about 1950,
Z25 = Z26 {w} in French and Swedish until about 1900.
In the Middle Ages, following the Latin tradition, 20 letters seem to have been enough for most writers (with v used for u),
Sometimes, mutated vowels and consonants like ä, ö, ü, ß (German), æ, œ (French), å, ø (Scandinavian), l (Polish), č, ě, ř, š, ž (Czech) occur in literary texts,...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Bauer, F.L. (1997). “Decrypted secrets.” Methods and Maxims of Cryptology. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 International Federation for Information Processing
About this entry
Cite this entry
Bauer, F.L. (2005). Alphabet. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-23483-7_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-23483-7_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-23473-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-23483-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering