The second letter of the Phoenician alphabet is bet (which means 'house' and looks a bit like a shelter) representing the sound [b], and from ālep-bēt came the word "alphabet" – another case where the beginning of a thing gives the name to the whole, which was in fact common practice in the ancient Near East.
[citation needed] The Glagolitic and early Cyrillic alphabets, although not consisting of ideograms, also have letters named acrophonically.
The letters representing /a, b, v, g, d, e/ are named az, buky, vedi, glagol, dobro, est.
Naming the letters in order, one recites a poem, a mnemonic which helps students and scholars learn the alphabet: Az buky vedi, glagol’ dobro est’ means 'I know letters, [the] word is good' in Old Church Slavonic.
In Irish and Ogham, letters were formerly named after trees, for example A was ailm ('white fir'), B was beith ('birch') and C was coll ('hazel').