alphabetic meaning: definition, etymology and quotations

alphabetic

adj

/ˌæl.fəˈbɛt.ɪk/

Etymology Partly from French alphabétique and partly from its etymon Latin alphabēticus. By surface analysis, alphabet + -ic.

Of or relating to an alphabet, especially the characters A to Z, both uppercase and lowercase.

Seycong or his linguistic consultants could use as a model the alphabetic or abugidic scripts of India and Inner Asia […]1996, Peter T. Daniels, William Bright, The World's Writing Systems, →ISBN, page 26:

Derived terms: alphabetician, alphabeticise, alphabeticity, alphabeticize, alphamagic square, analphabetic, holoalphabetic, monoalphabetic, multialphabetic, nonalphabetic, polyalphabetic, prealphabetic, unalphabetic
Related terms: alphabetize, alphameric, alphamerical, alphamerically, alphanumber, alphanumeric, alphanumerical, alphanumerically, alphasyllabary, alphasyllabic, alphasyllabical, alphasyllabically

noun

Etymology Partly from French alphabétique and partly from its etymon Latin alphabēticus. By surface analysis, alphabet + -ic.

An alphabetic character; a letter of the alphabet.

Upper case alphabetics can be composed of two characters: (1) a shift character; and (2) the desired alphabetic character.1960, Peter C. Tosini, Magnetic Drum Directory and Programming System for Codesorting Letter Mail, page 32:
The natural sequence of alphabetics is A, B, C, ..., X, Y, Z. For some codes, the binary bit patterns of the alphabetics are in the same relative sequence as the alphabetics.1980, Charles E. Mackenzie, Coded Character Sets: History and Development, page 33:

1 more example

Subparagraphs are identified by lower case alphabetics followed by numerics and alphabetics in parentheses and then underlined numerics and alphabetics.1987, United States. Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Acquisition & Logistics) ·, MILSTAMP TACs, page 15: