Acrophony is giving a letter in an alphabet a name which begins with the letter. The best kind of acrophony is in an ideographic or pictographic writing system, where the letter's name and glyph both represent the same thing or concept.

To explain the adjective acrophonic, consider a collection of ideograms such as the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. These icons have both a visual symbol and a verbal pronunciation. Many ideograms will have the same initial sound, for example, "k". Choose one representative ideogram from this subset of icons starting with k. Now, repeat this for each sound in the language, choosing one representative ideogram that starts with that sound.

These choices together form an alphabet. Such an alphabet is said to be formed acrophonically. Since the initial sound of a word is selected out to stand for the whole, and the results of this process are concatenated to form a new word, the term acrophonic is similar in derivation to acronym.

A concrete example of acrophony is in the ancient Phoenician alphabet. The first letter was originally a pictogram representing an ox, and was named after the ox, ʾāleph. The sound represented by the letter is also /a/. The Latin alphabet is descended from the Phoenician, and you can still see the stylized head of an ox if you turn the Latin letter A upside-down: ∀.

The Glagolitic and early Cyrillic alphabets, although not consisting of ideograms, also have letters named acrophonically. The letters representing /a, b, v, g, d, e/ are named Az, Buki, Vedi, Glagol, Dobro, Est. Naming the letters in order, one recites a poem, a mnemonic which helps students and scholars learn the alphabet.

Rudyard Kipling gives a fictional description of the process in one of his Just So Stories, "How the Alphabet was Made."

External link

• How the Alphabet was Made Kipling's story, online