Formation skydiving is the art of building formations in free-fall with multiple people gripping each others' limbs or specially built "grippers" on their jumpsuits.

Formation skydiving can be further divided into several sub-categories, so named for the number of members in a team:

• 4-way sequential
• 4-way vertical sequential (VRW)
• 8-way sequential
• 16-way sequential
• 10-way speed
• Large formations (Big-ways)

A competition in 4-way formation skydiving (FS-4) takes place like this:

There are two kinds of formations, called randoms and blocks. The randoms are singular formations with full separation of all grips both before and after building the formation. The blocks are double formations with a special designated movement pattern in between, called an inter. The start formation may, or may not be similar to the ending formation. The inters are differently performed. Here are some examples:

Inter 1: The grips are released between some of the flyers, so they become two pieces of two team members. they both do a 270 degree turn, and reconnect to a different formation

Inter 2: Three people stay connected, and do a 360 turn, while the last person, flies alone.

Inter 15: All grips are released and everyone does a 360 turn back to the original formation.

Blocks are designated by numbers, while randoms got letters. Blocks are worth one point for each correct formation, that makes 2 points, and randoms count as 1 point. There are 22 blocks and 16 randoms.

A competition consists of up to 10 rounds, and each round consists of 5 or 6 points, which the teams are to repeat as many times as they can within the working time of 35 seconds. The score judging are based on the videographers material.

A competition draw may look like this:

1. C-E-B-13 2. 14-20-8 3. 15-16-H 4. J-O-1-D 5. 6-18-19 6. 5-F-21 7. 10-K-G-M 8. 22-3-P 9. 12-9-4 10. 11-17-Q

The winning team will be the team that has collected most points, by completing the most correct formations within time after the final round is ended. In case of weather or technical problems, or other causes, a competition will be valid as long as all teams has completed at least one round.

The current [http://records.fai.org/parachuting/current.asp?id0=1&id1=202&id2=1&id3=15 FAI world record] for largest free-fall formation is a 400-way, set on February 8, 2006 in Udon Thani, Thailand by [http://www.theworldteam.com/ World Team]. It was held for 4.25 seconds. They used five C-130 Herculesairplanes and exited from an altitude of 25,000 feet.

A recent sub-category of formation skydiving is vertical formation skydiving (VRW). Skydivers build formations using higher-speed body positions normally associated with freeflying, such as head down and sitflying.

A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Each letter in the written language is usually associated with one phoneme (sound) in the spoken form of the language.

Written signs in other writing systems are best called syllabograms (which denote a syllable) or logograms (which denote a word or phrase).

Definition and usage

The term letter is loaned from Old French lettre into Middle English around AD 1200. It derives ultimately from Latin littera, itself of unknown origin. The Middle English plural lettres could refer to an epistle or written document, reflecting the use of the Latin plural litteræ. Use of the singularletterto refer to a written document emerges in the 14th century.

As symbols that denote segmental speech, letters are associated with phonetics. In a purely phonemic alphabet, a single phoneme is denoted by a single letter, but in history and practice letters often denote more than one phoneme. A pair of letters designating a single phoneme is called a digraph. Examples of digraphs in English include "ch", "sh" and "th". A phoneme can also be represented by three letters, called a trigraph. An example is the combination "sch" in German.

A letter may also be associated with more than one phoneme, with the phoneme depending on the surrounding letters or etymology of the word. As an example of positional effects, the Spanish letter c is pronounced [k] before a, o, or u (e.g. cantar, corto, cuidado), but is pronounced [s] before e or i (e.g. centimo, ciudad).

Letters also have specific names associated with them. These names may differ with language, dialect and history. Z, for example, is usually called zed in all English-speaking countries except the U.S., where it is named zee.

Letters, as elements of alphabets, have prescribed orders. This may generally be known as "alphabetical order" though collation is the science devoted to the complex task of ordering and sorting of letters and words in different languages. In Spanish, for instance, ñ is a separate letter being sorted after n. In English, n and ñ are sorted alike.

Letters may also have numerical value. This is true of Roman numerals and the letters of other writing systems. In English, Arabic numerals are typically used instead of letters.

Letters may be used as words. The words a (lower or uppercase) and I (always uppercase) are the most common English letter-words. Sometimes O is used for Oh in poetic situations. In extremely informal cases of writing, individual letters may replace words, e.g. U may be used instead of "You" in English, when the letter is pronounced as a homophone of the word.

People and objects are sometimes named after letters, for one of these reasons:

1. The letter is an abbreviation, e.g. "G-man" as slang for a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, arose as short for "Government Man".
2. Alphabetical order used as a counting system, e.g. Plan A, Plan B, etc; alpha ray, beta ray, gamma ray, delta ray, epsilon ray
3. The shape of the letter, e.g. D-ring, F-clamp, G-clamp, H-block, H engine, O-ring, R-clip, U engine, V engine, Z-drive, a river delta
4. Other reasons, e.g. X-ray after "x the unknown" in algebra, because the discoverer did not know what they were.

A Classical definition

Guilhem Molinier, a member of the Consistori del Gay Saber, which was the first literary academy in the world and held the Floral Games to award the best troubadour with the violeta d'aur top prize, gave a definition of the letter in his Leys d'amor(1328–1337), a book aimed at regulating the then flourishingOccitan poetry:

History

The invention of letters was preceded by the West Semitic script, which appeared in Canaan around 1000 BC. Antecedents are suspected in the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, dated to around 1800 BC. Virtually all alphabets have their ultimate origins from this system. The Greek alphabet, invented around From Yahoo Answers