Facts About the Alphabet
Brooke Nelson Alexander, Reader’s Digest, RD.com.
Why find out about the alphabet? Spiritual ideas and concepts are often passed along in written form. (There is an Alphabet Museum near Waxhaw, NC, jaars.org/museum, 704 843-6000.)
A: Ancient Egyptians wrote the letter upside down, or we do, creating a symbol that resembled a bull with horns.
B: This letter is a pictograph of a house rotated to the right. With numbers, you won’t use a single letter “b” until you reach one billion.
C: C was originally the Phoenician symbol for camel (gimel). Benjamin Franklin wanted to banish C from the alphabet—along with J, Q, W, and X. He wanted to simplify the English language.
D: D-day means “day-day”. June 5, 1944, was D-1 in Europe.
E: “E” is used more often than any other letter. It appears in 11 percent of all words. This letter is a pictograph of enthusiasm by a human being—arms are up-right.
F: The lowest grade in school was “E”. Professors worried that students would think the grade meant “excellent”. Nowadays “F” means “failed”.
G: The Romans created the G from the letter C.
H: Brits pronounce “H” two ways: ‘aitch’ and ‘haitch.’ Accents that dropped the “H” from words are considered lower class.
I: The dot over the letters “i” and “j” are called a “tittle”.
J: J is the youngest letter to be added to the alphabet. “J” and “Q” do not appear on the periodic table.
K: In baseball “K” means “struck out”.
L: The Roman numeral for 50.
M: When you say “M” your lips touch.
N: The Phoenician word for “water” was “nun”. The Aramaic word “nun” meant “fish” The “N” is a pictorial of a crashing wave.
O: Four letters (A, E, O, L) are doubled at the beginning of these English words: aardvark, eel, ooze, llama.
P: This letter needs no help: pap, pep, pip, pop, pup.
Q: One out of every 510 English letters is a Q.
R: The letter R is referred to as the canine letter. In Latin, the way speakers trilled the R sounded like a growling dog.
S: There was a “long S” that resembled the letter ‘f’ but was pronounced as “s” or "ss".
T: The term “T-shirt” got its name for the ‘T’ shape of the body and sleeves.
U: Before the 1500s, “U” and “V” were used interchangeably as a vowel or a consonant.
V. V is the only letter in the English language that is never silent.
W: The Latin alphabet did not have a letter to represent the sound /w/ in Old English: scribes just wrote it as “uu”.
X: The mathematician René Descartes used the last three letters of the alphabet to represent unknown quantities in his math book “The Geometry”.
Y: “Y” functions as a vowel and a consonant. Consider “myth” (vowel) and then “young” (consonant).
Z: Believe it or not, the letter Z has not always been the last letter of the alphabet; in the Greek alphabet, it was the seventh letter.
Here is a list of each letter’s frequency of usage. E is most commonly used letter, and Z is the rarest letter in the English language:
E T A O I N S H R D L C U M W F G Y P B V K J X Q Z
07/13/25