The science of representing spoken sounds by letters.

"Alphabetics is the use of letters to represent spoken words. Because spoken words are made up of smaller, more basic sounds (phonemes), alphabetics includes phonemic awareness, or knowing how phonemes are combined to make words. It also includes phonics or letter-sound knowledge--knowing the relationship between letters or letter combinations and the sounds they represent and how these are put together to form words. The word cat, for example, is made up of three sounds represented by the letters , , and " (Kruidenier, 2002).