Letter

A letter is a written message addressed to a person or organization, used for personal, business, official, or ceremonial purposes. In a broader sense, a letter is also a symbol in a writing system that represents a sound or combination of sounds in an alphabet.

Historically, the concept of letters evolved from early scripts and cuneiform to alphabets. The Phoenician alphabet provided the template for Greek, which in turn influenced Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Letters were often handwritten on parchment or paper and later reproduced by printing presses from the 15th century onward, enabling wider distribution.

A typical personal letter includes a date, a salutation, a body of text, a closing, and a signature. Business letters follow more formal conventions, sometimes including a subject line, letterhead, and enclosures or copies. In modern use, emails and instant messages have largely supplanted traditional mailed letters, while retaining the same communicative purpose.

In writing systems, a letter is a grapheme that corresponds to a phoneme or phonemes. Letters appear in upper and lower case and are arranged in a fixed alphabet. Orthography, diacritics, and typography influence how letters convey language and meaning.

The postal system and stamps enabled the global distribution of letters, making long-distance communication practical for centuries. Letters also play a central role in literature as a narrative device and in archives as historical records. The term "letter" thus encompasses both a communicative act and a set of written characters.