Chapter Along-shore Men to Alvina Weeps of A by Brewer's Phrase & Fable

Along-shore Men to Alvina Weeps

Along-shore Men or Longshoremen, that is stevedores (2 syl.), or men employed to load and unload vessels.

Alonzo of Aguilar When Fernando, King of Aragon, was laying siege to Granada, after chasing Zagal from the gates, he asked who would undertake to plant his banner on the heights. Alonzo, "the lowmost of the dons," undertook the task, but was cut down by the Moors. His body was exposed in the wood of Oxijera, and the Moorish damsels, struck with its beauty, buried it near the brook of Alpuxarra.

Aloof Stand aloof, away. A sea term, meaning originally to bear to windward, or luff. (Norwegian, German, etc., luft, wind, breeze.)

Alorus so the Chaldeans called their first king, who, they say, came from Babylon.

A l'outrance To the uttermost. (Anglo-French for à outrance.)

"A champion has started up to maintain à l'outrance her innocence of the great offence." - Standard.

Alp The Adrian renegade, a Venetian by extraction, who forswore the Christian faith to become a commander in the Turkish army. He led the host to the siege of Corinth, while that country was under the dominion of the Doge. He loved Francesca, daughter of Minotti, governor of Corinth, but she died of a broken heart because he deserted his country and was an apostate. The renegade was shot in the siege. - Byron: Siege of Corinth.

Alph A mythical "sacred river in Xanadu," which ran "through caverns measureless to man." - Coleridge: Kubla Khan.

Alpha "I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last" (Rev. i. 8). "Alpha" is the first, and "O-mega" the last letter of the Greek alphabet. A &hgr.

Alphabet This is the only word compounded of letters only. The Greek alpha (a) beta (b); our A B C (book), etc.

The number of letters in an alphabet varies in different languages. Thus there are:

Letters	Language
21	Italian alphabet.
22	Hebrew & Syriac alphabet
23	Latin alphabet
24	Greek alphabet
25	French alphabet
26	English, German, Dutch alphabet
27	Spanish alphabet
28	Arabic alphabet
32	Coptic alphabet
33	Russian alphabet
38	Armenian alphabet
39	Georgian alphabet
40	Slavonic alphabet
45	Persian (Zend) alphabet
49	Sanskrit alphabet

The Chinese have no alphabet, but about 20,000 syllabic characters.

Ezra vii. 21 contains all the letters of the English language, presuming I and J to be identical.
Even the Italian alphabet is capable of more than seventeen trillion combinations; that is, 17 followed by eighteen other figures, as -
17,000,000,000,000,000,000;
while the English alphabet will combine into more than twenty-nine thousand quatrillion combinations; that is, 29 followed by twenty-seven other figures, as -
29,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Yet we have no means of marking the several sounds of our different vowels; nor can we show how to pronounce such simple words as foot (pull and dull), sugar (father and rather), (gin and be-gin), calm, Bourges, Boeuf in "Boeuf-gras," oeufs, and thousands of other words.

We want the restoration of th to distinguish between this and thin; a Greek ch to distinguish between Church and Christ, two g 's (one soft and one hard), two c 's, two o 's, half a dozen a 's, and so on.

Take a, we have fate, fat, Thames (e), war (o), salt (au), etc. So with e, we have prey (a), met (e), England (i), sew (o), herb (u), etc. The other vowels are equally indefinite.