26 Fascinating Facts About Every Letter in the English Alphabet
Updated: Oct. 04, 2018Bet you didn’t know THIS when you learned your ABCs.
A is for…
Believe it or not, the capital A hasn’t always looked the way it does now. Ancient Egyptians wrote the letter upside down, creating a symbol that resembled a steer with horns.
B is for…
Grab a paper and pen, and start writing down every number as a word. Do you notice one missing? If you kept going, you wouldn’t use a single letter B until you reached one billion.
Here’s the real reason some English words have silent letters!
C is for…
Benjamin Franklin reportedly wanted to banish C from the alphabet—along with J, Q, W, and X—and replace them with six letters he invented himself. Doing so, Franklin claimed, would simplify the English language. Word nerds will appreciate these grammar jokes.
D is for…
Contrary to popular belief, the letter D in D-day does not stand for “doom” or “disaster”—it simply stands for “day.” The Army names any important military operation or invasion with this term, using it as a placeholder for a certain calendar date. Check out more history lessons your teacher lied to you about.
E is for…
The letter E is the most common letter in the English language. It appears in 11 per cent of all words, according to an analysis of 240,000 entries in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
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F is for…
These days, a failing grade is usually designated with an F. However, that grade used to be represented by the letter E. When administrators at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts redesigned the grading system in 1898, professors worried that students would think the grade meant “excellent.”According to Slate, F more obviously stands for “failure” or “failed.”
G is for…
Both G and C were originally represented by the Phoenician symbol for gimel, which meant “camel.” It was the Romans who finally separated the two letters, letting C keep its shape and adding a bar at the bottom for the letter G.
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H is for…
H might be the most hated letter in Britain, according to Michael Rosen, author of Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story. For almost two thousand years, Brits have pronounced H two ways: ‘aitch’ and ‘haitch.’ Accents that dropped the H from words were once considered lower class, Rosen writes. What’s more, different pronunciations of the letter also distinguished the Catholics from the Protestants in Northern Ireland.
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I is for…
Funny enough, the dot over the letters “i” and “j” actually has a name. It is called a tittle, or superscript dot.
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J is for…
J is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear on the periodic table. Invented in 1524 by an Italian, J was also the last letter to be added to the alphabet.
An MIT professor called this the hardest logic puzzle ever. Can you solve it?
K is for…
No matter how high you count in the English language, you will never find a number that uses the letter K. Same goes for the letters J and Z.
Can you solve this tricky numbers riddle in less than 60 seconds?
L is for…
The Super Bowl has traditionally used Roman numerals to denote the number of the Big Game. But for its 50th anniversary, it chose not to use the Roman numeral for 50, which is L. The slogan “Super Bowl L” put a bad taste in the NFL’s mouth, Rolling Stone reports. Why? L tends to stand for a “loss” in football.
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M is for…
You can’t say the letter M without your lips touching. Go ahead and try it! Then, give the hardest words to pronounce in the English language a shot.
N is for…
The letter N was originally a pictorial representation of a fish, or one wave that resembled a camel hump.
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O is for…
Only four letters (A, E, O, L) are doubled at the beginning of a word (aardvark, eel, ooze, llama, etc.), and more words start with double O than any others in the English language.
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P is for…
The letter P originally came from the Phoenician letter “rosh,” or R, which looked like a backward P. The word rosh meant “head”—hence the symbol’s resemblance to a neck and head.
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Q is for…
One out of every 510 letters in English words is a Q, making it the least common letter in the English alphabet, according to an Oxford English Dictionary analysis.
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R is for…
The letter R is sometimes referred to as the “littera canina,” or canine letter. In Latin, the way speakers trilled the R sounded like a growling dog. William Shakespeare even gave the letter a shout-out in his play Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet’s nurse calls the letter R “the dog’s name” in Act 2, scene 4.
S is for…
The English alphabet briefly included a typographical letter called a “long s.” Used from the late Renaissance to the early 1800s, it resembled the letter ‘f’ but was pronounced simply as ‘s.’ Eventually, the letter fell out of use; John Bell, who pioneered a new modern typeface, is often blamed for the disappearance of the long s.
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T is for…
The term “T-shirt” got its name for the ‘T’ shape of the body and sleeves. It is a relatively new word, too. According to TodayIFoundOut, F. Scott Fitzgerald was reportedly the first person to print the term “T-shirt” in 1920, when the main character in his novel This Side of Paradise brings a T-shirt with him to college.
U is for…
Up until 1629, the letters U and V were used interchangeably; the shape V stood for both the vowel U and the consonant V. It wasn’t until an Italian printer named Lazare Zetzner started using the letter U in his print shop that the two letters became distinct.
V is for…
V is the only letter in the English language that is never silent, according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Think about it: Even unusual letters like Z and J are silent in words we have borrowed from foreign languages, such as marijuana (originally a Spanish word) and laissez-faire (French).
W is for…
If you have ever wondered why we call it a “double-u” instead of “double-v,” you’re not alone. However, the explanation is surprisingly simple. Because the Latin alphabet did not have a letter to represent the sound /w/ in Old English, 7th-century scribes just wrote it as ‘uu.’ The double-u symbol eventually meshed together to form the letter W.
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X is for…
From “X marks the spot” to “solve for x,” we often use the letter ‘x’ to represent the unknown. But where did this trend come from? According to Gizmodo, French mathematician René Descartes used the last three letters of the alphabet to represent unknown quantities in his book La Géométrie, which invented analytic geometry. By contrast, he chose a, b, and c to represent the known.
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Y is for…
The Oxford English Dictionary considers Y a “semivowel.” While the letter stops your breath in words like yell and young—making it a consonant—it can also create an open vocal sound in words like myth or hymn, which makes it a vowel.
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Z is for…
Believe it or not, the letter Z has not always been the last letter of the alphabet; in the Greek alphabet, it had a respectable place at number seven.
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