It's not always easy to know the origin of words but sometimes it's fairly self-explanatory even if not immediately obvious. I don't think I had even really thought about the word alphabet* until we were driving in Central Queensland and we saw the signs for the next town along the road - Alpha. This led to discussion about the Greek Alphabet ... and at some point shortly thereafter the penny dropped - the word Alphabet is from the first two letters of the Greek Alphabet - Alpha and Beta. The Phoenician Alphabet was the basis of the Greek Alphabet ... so did they call it an Alphabet or was that term coined later? Later it seems ... the world Alphabet has it's origins in the Middle Ages but does derive from the Greek word alphábētos.
* Oxford Dictionary: a system of writing, developed in the ancient Near East and transmitted from the northwest Semites to the Greeks, in which each symbol ideally represents one sound unit in the spoken language, and from which most alphabetical scripts are derived.
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