Acrophony

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The practice of using the initial letter of a word as the symbol for the sound that word begins with, as in writing a letter to stand for an object's name
2. A writing principle in which the first letter of an object's name is taken to stand for that object, forming the basis of many early alphabets
3. Representing a sound by the first letter of the word naming the thing, a method seen in the origins of several ancient scripts

Etymology: Acrophony is a term from writing systems, and its meaning is built directly into its parts. It combines the Ancient Greek "ákros", meaning "uppermost" or "beginning", with "phōnḗ", meaning "sound". The idea is that a symbol takes its sound from the first sound of the object it depicts, so the sign for an ox, drawn as a head, gives the first sound of the word for that animal rather than naming the whole thing. The principle is most famously seen in the earliest alphabets. Phoenician letters such as aleph, which stood for an ox, and bet, a house, each carried a sound taken from the start of the thing pictured. Greek and later Latin inherited these letter shapes and names, so the link between picture and first sound survives in the alphabet many people use today, even though the original pictures have been forgotten.