WYVERN, or WIVERN  , the name of an heraldic monster, with the forepart of a winged dragon and the hind part of a serpent or lizard (see HERALDRY) . The earlier spelling of the word was wiver or wivere; O . Eng. wyvre; O . Fr. wivee, mod. givre . It is a doublet of " viper," with an excrescent n, as in " bittern," M . Eng. bitore . X the twenty-fourth letter of the English alphabet . Its position and form are derived from the Latin alphabet, which received them from the Western Greek alphabet . The alphabet of the Western Greeks differed from the Ionic, which is the Greek alphabet now in general use, by the shape and position of X and of some other consonants . The Ionic alphabet placed x () immediately after N and, in the oldest records, in the form +, from which the ordinary Greek capital 17 was developed . The position and shape of this symbol show clearly that it was taken from the Semitic Samekh, which on the Moabite stone appears as . Why the Greeks attached this value to the symbol is not clear; in Semitic the symbol indicates the ordinary s .

Still less clear is the origin of the form X, which in the Ionic alphabet stands for x (k followed by a breath) . In a very

ancient alphabet on a small vase found in 1882 at Formello near the ancient Veii in Etruria, a symbol appears after N consisting of three horizontal and three vertical lines, ® . From this it has been suggested that both forms of the Greek x are derived, by removing the vertical lines, X in its earliest form + by removing the four marginal lines . The Ionic symbol, however, corresponds closely to the earliest Phoenician, so that this theory is not very plausible for Z, and there are various other possibilities for the development of X (see ALPHABET) . This symbol appears in the very early Latin inscriptions found in the Roman Forum in 1899 as )& . In its usual value as ks it is superfluous . In the Ionic alphabet it was useful, because there it represented a single sound, which before the invention of the symbol had to be represented by kit . In the alphabet in use officially at Athens before 403 B.C . X was written by Yv (kits) . In English there is an interesting variation of pronunciation in many words according to the position of the accent: if the accent precedes, x is pronounced ks; if it follows, x is pronounced gz: compare exit (eksit) with exact (egzact) . The symbol X was used both by the Romans and the Etruscans for the numeral to . Which borrowed from the other is uncertain, but the Etruscans did not use X as part of their alphabet .

X with a horizontal

line over it was used for 10,000, and when a line on each side was added, n, for a million . (P .