Why Is ‘A’ the First Letter of the Alphabet?

Our modern English alphabet, consisting of 26 letters, is sometimes taken for granted. But if someone were to say that the letter “a” was no longer the first letter in the sequence, the outcry and ensuing chaos would be swift and widespread. For all of us, “a” naturally comes first — in the alphabet, in school grades, and in expressions such as “A to Z” and “A-list.” Even the word “alphabet” comes from the Greek alphabetos, itself from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the alphabet. 

But why is “a” the first letter, and not “b,” or “m,” or any other? After all, we don’t have to stick to an established sequence — QWERTY keyboards do away with alphabetic order altogether, and we use them every day. Here we take a voyage of discovery spanning thousands of years to find out how our alphabet evolved, where the letter “a” comes from, and why it is first in our alphabet. 

The evolution of our modern alphabet begins somewhere between 1700 and 1500 BCE on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Here, a group of Semitic-speaking people, quite likely the Phoenicians, developed a writing system that would change the world: a streamlined alphabet of 22 letters that was vastly more efficient and easier to learn than pictographic symbols such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, which required hundreds of individual symbols.  

This new system of letters was highly practical and soon spread across the region. But the Phoenician alphabet was what linguists call an “abjad” — it contained only consonants and no vowels. Readers were expected to supply the vowel sounds from context, which worked fairly well for Semitic languages in which vowels were largely predictable from the consonant root of a word. But it didn’t work so well for other languages. 

So, when the Greeks encountered the alphabet sometime around 1000 BCE, they recognized its potential but had to spruce it up a little: They added vowels. The result was the world’s first true alphabet, one with both consonants and vowels. This new, refined alphabet became the foundation for Latin (via the Romans), which became the basis for virtually every alphabet used in Europe today, including ours. 

The modern English alphabet is more accurately called the Germanic alphabet. It developed from the Latin alphabet to be used in English, German, Swedish, Dutch, Danish, and related languages. Other alphabets that developed from Latin include the Romance (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.), Slavic (Polish, Czech, Slovak, etc.), Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian), and Finno-Ugric (Finnish, Hungarian, etc.) alphabets.

Like most letters, the letter “a” began life as a picture — its roots can be traced to an Egyptian hieroglyph that represents an ox’s head. In early Semitic writing, this symbol was turned into the letter aleph — the ancestor of “a” — which also took the form of an ox’s head. Fascinatingly, the ox can still be seen today. If you take the modern capital letter “A” and turn it upside down, you can clearly see an ox’s head with its two horns. 

When the Greeks adopted aleph, they used it to represent the vowel “a” and renamed it alpha. They also changed the letter’s orientation: Where the Phoenicians drew the letter with the ox’s nose pointing sideways, the Greeks remodeled it on geometrical lines and rotated it upright, so it stood on its horns — the modern capital “A.” So, while the original ox head symbol of “a” has been rotated and abstracted over three millennia, its root symbology has never entirely disappeared.

And now we get to the crux of the matter: Why does the letter “a” come first in the alphabet? We know that “a” has stood at the head of the alphabet throughout its known history. But here, somewhat unsatisfactorily, is where certainty runs out. “A” has been first since at least the Phoenician alphabet and possibly in earlier Semitic writing systems that preceded it. But why exactly it sat in first place originally, we cannot say for sure. The Phoenicians left no record explaining their letter order, and the question has been debated by linguists and historians for generations.

Several theories exist, but none of them are proven. It’s possible that the Semitic alphabet followed some kind of order established by earlier Egyptian hieroglyphics, or that each letter had some kind of numerical equivalent that determined the sequence. It’s also possible that there was some kind of mnemonic device that gave rise to the arrangement, but if that was the case, any evidence has long been lost to time. 

Another common theory highlights the importance of the ox in ancient civilizations. In these agricultural societies, the ox was the most valuable animal a family could own — used for plowing, a source of food, and a clear measure of wealth. It could be that aleph — the ox — gained its primacy simply because of the animal’s high status. However, this theory is impossible to verify.

Of course, as with many things in history, it may be that the order of the alphabet was largely or entirely accidental — just a quirk of historical fate. What we do know for sure is that once it had been established, the order became self-reinforcing: Each generation learned the alphabet and passed it down to the next, with “a” firmly in place at the start. No matter how it earned its place at the head of the alphabet, it steadfastly maintained it — becoming one of the most long-lasting human conventions still in daily use.