It was largely similar to the Lydian and the Phrygian alphabets.

Some sounds are represented by more than one symbol, which is considered one "letter".

Nine of the Lycian letters do not appear to derive from the Greek alphabet.

Lycian uses the following number symbols: I (vertical stroke) = 1, < ("less than" sign) (or, rarely, L or C or V or Y) = 5, O (circle) = 10; a horizontal stroke — is one half;[5] a symbol somewhat like our letter H may mean 100.

The Lycian alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1.