acrophony

noun

Meaning

The naming of a letter of an alphabet by a word that begins with that letter.

Examples

  • The Phoenician alphabet relied on acrophony, where the symbol for 'aleph' represented an ox.
  • Linguists study acrophony to understand how ancient writing systems evolved from pictographs into phonetic characters.

Synonyms: naming, phonetic naming, acrophonic naming, grapheme-phoneme association