Phoenician alphabet
nounDefinition of Phoenician alphabet
1
: an extinct northern Semitic alphabet used by the Phoenicians of Syria and their Carthaginian colonists from the 13th century b.c. and the immediate ancestor of the Greek alphabet
2
: the ancestor of the alphabets used by the Phoenicians and other contemporary Semitic inhabitants of western Syria that is held to be the earliest system of alphabetic writing
3
: the oldest Hebrew alphabet as distinguished from the square Hebrew or Aramaic alphabet