Glagolitic Alphabet

one of two early Slavic alphabets.

The Glagolitic alphabet coincides almost completely with the second Slavic alphabet (the Cyrillic) in composition and arrangement, as well as in phonetic denotation and names of the letters, but it differs sharply in the forms of the symbols themselves. It is possible to determine only approximately the appearance of the earliest Glagolitic writing, since the oldest surviving documents are products of the end of the tenth century (such as the Kiev Sheets and the Zograf Gospel).

In contrast to the Cyrillic alphabet, from which the Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and other systems of writing arose, the Glagolitic alphabet did not exist for long and was confined to usage primarily among southwestern Slavs, such as those of Croatia and Dalmatia.