littera

Latin littera (also litera) meant a letter of the alphabet — a single character. The plural, litterae, meant letters in general: writing, literature, learning, and also a written document or epistle. English inherited both meanings through Old French letre. A letter is an 'a' or a 'b.' A letter is also something you mail. The ambiguity is Latin, and English preserved it intact.

The letter of the alphabet is one of humanity's most efficient inventions. The Phoenician alphabet, developed around 1050 BCE, used about 22 symbols to represent consonant sounds. The Greeks added vowels around 800 BCE. From that system came the Latin alphabet — 23 letters that could encode any Latin word. The efficiency is staggering: 26 letters (in modern English) can represent every word in a language of over a million words. The letter is the atom of writing.

The letter as correspondence followed writing technology. Egyptian letters on papyrus, Babylonian letters on clay tablets, Roman letters on wax tablets and then parchment. Pliny the Younger's published letters from the first century CE are some of the most vivid accounts of Roman daily life. Cicero's letters survived and shaped Renaissance prose style. The form peaked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the great age of letter writing — before telegraph, telephone, and email shortened the form into extinction.

Email killed the letter but kept the word. An email is electronic mail, and mail is letters. The structure persists: addressee, greeting, body, closing, signature. A text message is a letter stripped to its minimum. A DM is a letter without postage. The form has been compressed, accelerated, and rendered instantaneous, but the word 'letter' still names both the building block of writing and the act of sending writing to someone specific.