alphabet vs hieroglyphic

alphabet

noun
  • An individual letter of an alphabet; an alphabetic character. 

  • The set of letters used when writing in a language. 

  • An agent of the FBI, the CIA, or another such government agency. 

  • A typically finite set of distinguishable symbols. 

  • A writing system in which there are letters for the consonant and vowel phonemes. (Contrast e.g. abjad.) 

  • A writing system in which letters represent phonemes. (Contrast e.g. logography, a writing system in which each character represents a word, and syllabary, in which each character represents a syllable.) 

  • The simplest rudiments; elements. 

verb
  • To designate by the letters of the alphabet; to arrange alphabetically. 

hieroglyphic

noun
  • Undecipherable handwriting or secret symbol. 

  • Any symbol used in this system; a hieroglyph. 

  • A writing system of ancient Egypt, Minoans, Maya and other civilizations, using pictorial symbols to represent individual sounds as a rebus 

adj
  • difficult to decipher 

  • of, relating to, or written with this system of symbols 

How often have the words alphabet and hieroglyphic occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )