98 Fun Facts About Alphabet

Which letter of the English alphabet is named for the way it was first written?

W: Old English scribes first wrote the sound as 'uu', a doubled u, and the name double-u stuck long after the pair had fused into a single letter.

The terms 'upper case' and 'lower case' come from the trays used by which tradesmen to store their letters?

Printers: compositors kept their metal type in two shallow trays, or cases, with the capitals in the upper one on the sloped work-table and the small letters within easier reach below.

The Greek letter names alpha and beta derive from Phoenician words for what?

Ox and house: aleph is thought to have begun as a little drawing of an ox's head and bet as the plan of a house, and each sign took the first sound of the word it pictured.

Which country dropped its Arabic-based script for a new Latin alphabet in 1928?

Turkey: the switch was one of Ataturk's reforms and took effect in November 1928, ending centuries of writing Turkish in the Perso-Arabic script.

What is an abjad, like the Phoenician or Arabic script?

An alphabet that writes only consonants: readers supply the vowels from context, much as an English speaker can still make out 'bldg' or 'txt msg'.

Which script was the first to give vowels their own independent letters?

Greek: the borrowed Phoenician signs included consonants the language did not have, so the Greeks reused five of them for vowels, turning the throat-catch aleph into alpha, the letter A.

What is the small dot above a lowercase i or j called?

A tittle: the word has meant a tiny pen-stroke since the 14th century, and the King James Bible's 'one jot or one tittle' made it a byword for the smallest detail.

The Latin script evolved most directly from which earlier neighbouring script?

Etruscan: Rome took its letters from its northern neighbours before 600 BC, and early Latin wrote both k and g sounds with C, probably an Etruscan habit, until G was added centuries later.

Which letter's name literally means 'little O'?

Omicron: the Greeks told their two O sounds apart as 'o mikron', the small or short one, and 'o mega', the great one, which is how the last letter of their alphabet got its name too.

Which letter is the most commonly used in English?

E makes up about one letter in eight, and Linotype machines laid out their keys by frequency, so a finger run down the first two columns typed the nonsense line 'etaoin shrdlu'.

Which letter turns up least often in ordinary English text?

Z makes up fewer than one letter in a thousand of ordinary English prose, and Scrabble, whose tile values follow letter frequency, pays for the rarity: a set has a single Z, worth ten points.

Which two letters of the modern English alphabet began as variant shapes of V and I?

U and J: for centuries each pair was one letter doing duty as both vowel and consonant, and J was not fully accepted as a letter in its own right until the 17th century.

What is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet called?

A pangram earns its keep as a drill: because it holds every letter, writing teachers of the 1880s set one as copy for their pupils, and typists and font designers still use them.

Which is the best-known sentence using every letter?

'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' was already a classroom favourite in 1885, when a Boston newspaper noted that writing teachers set it because it holds every letter.

Today's code word is Echo; in the wartime 'Able Baker' alphabet, which word stood for E?

Easy: the American alphabet of 1941 began Able, Baker and gave E this word, which is why the paratroopers of E Company in Band of Brothers are remembered as Easy Company.

Which code word stands for the letter Z in the NATO alphabet?

Zulu: the time zone on the Greenwich meridian is lettered Z, so pilots and navies call Coordinated Universal Time 'Zulu time'; in the wartime alphabet the word for Z had been Zebra.

For whose benefit does the NATO alphabet spell 'Alfa' with an f and 'Juliett' with a double t?

Non-English speakers: a French reader might leave a single final t silent and others would not read 'ph' as f, so the spellings were bent until everyone said the words the same way.

Despite its name, the NATO phonetic alphabet was finalised in the 1950s by which organisation?

The International Civil Aviation Organization settled the words after comprehension tests on speakers of 31 nationalities, and NATO's forces took up the same list, which is how it got its popular name.

The ampersand '&' began as a joined-up way of writing which Latin word?

Et: Roman scribes ran together the two letters of their word for 'and', and in some typefaces, italics above all, you can still pick out the E and the t.

The word 'ampersand' is a corruption of which phrase?

'And per se and': children reciting their letters ended '... X, Y, Z and per se and', meaning that & by itself stands for 'and', because the sign was taught as a last character after Z.

Who invented the raised-dot reading system for the blind, at age 15?

Louis Braille was blinded at three while playing with tools in his father's workshop, and he never saw his system win: his own school adopted it only in 1854, two years after his death.

Each character in the raised-dot reading system for the blind uses a cell of how many dots?

Six dots, in two columns of three, give 63 different characters, enough for the system's inventor, an organist himself, to adapt it to musical notation as well as letters and numbers.

The telegraph code used to send text over wires encodes letters as which two signals?

Dots and dashes: the distress call SOS stands for nothing at all and was chosen because three dots, three dashes and three dots are simple to send and hard to mistake.

After which painter turned inventor is the telegraph code of the 1830s named?

Samuel Morse worked out the code with his assistant Alfred Vail, who went on improving it, and in 1844 the pair opened their first long line, from Washington to Baltimore.

Which Korean king created the Hangul alphabet in the 1440s?

Sejong the Great published it in 1446 under a title meaning 'the correct sounds for the instruction of the people'; the name Hangul was coined only in the 20th century.

The basic consonant letters of Hangul were designed to picture what?

The speech organs making each sound: five basic shapes sketch the tongue, mouth, teeth and throat in position, and harsher sounds are built by adding lines to them.

Which script did Korea use before Hangul was created?

Chinese characters (Hanja) kept their hold long after the alphabet arrived: for centuries most Koreans who could write went on using classical Chinese and left the new letters to the less schooled.

The Cyrillic script is used to write which language?

Russian is only the best known: the script writes more than fifty languages, carried far beyond the Slavs to Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Tajik in Central Asia.

The Cyrillic script became the third official script of the EU when which country joined in 2007?

Bulgaria's entry is why euro banknotes of the second series spell the currency three ways, adding a Cyrillic version to the two that were already there.

Which pair of missionary brothers is credited with creating Glagolitic, the first Slavic alphabet?

Cyril and Methodius devised Glagolitic for their mission to the Slavs in the 860s; the better-known script that carries one brother's name was worked out later by their followers.

Which playwright left money in his will to create a new alphabet for English?

George Bernard Shaw had long attacked the way English is spelled; after his death a competition was held, and the alphabet that came out of it was used to print his play Androcles and the Lion.

Some of the earliest alphabetic inscriptions were left by Canaanite workers at Egyptian mines for which stone?

Turquoise: at the Sinai mines of Serabit el-Khadim the workers borrowed the shapes of Egyptian picture-signs but used each one for the first sound of their own word for the thing shown.

The word 'futhark', used for runic alphabets such as the Elder Futhark, comes from what?

Their first six runes stand for f, u, th, a, r and k, so 'futhark' names the row by its opening signs, the same trick that makes an ABC out of the first letters of ours.

The 'Ye' in 'Ye Olde Shoppe' is really 'the', with y standing in for which lost English letter?

Thorn was the old letter for the 'th' sound; its written and printed forms looked so like a y that the two were swapped, so nobody ever actually said 'ye' for 'the'.

Which alphabet, devised by language teachers in the 1880s, aims to give every speech sound its own symbol?

The International Phonetic Alphabet began with French and English language teachers led by Paul Passy, who wanted a way round the erratic spelling that hides how foreign words are really said.

What is the name for ancient writing whose lines run alternately left to right and right to left?

Boustrophedon pictures a plough team turning at the end of each furrow: the stone-cutter simply started the next line where the last one stopped, often flipping the letters to face the new direction.

Which language uses the letters j, k, x, y and w only in foreign words?

Italian counts only 21 letters as its own, so the five outsiders turn up in borrowed words such as 'weekend' and in a handful of proper names, the football club Juventus among them.

Ogham, an alphabet found carved on standing stones, was used mainly to write an early form of which language?

Irish: most Ogham stones stand in the south of Ireland, above all in Kerry, Cork and Waterford, and usually carry little more than a person's name, probably to mark who owned the land.

Which NATO alphabet code word became famous as the name of a Cold War border crossing in Berlin?

Charlie: it was simply the third Allied checkpoint on the road to Berlin, after Checkpoint Alpha on the inner-German border and Checkpoint Bravo at the edge of the city.

Which port, home of the oldest surviving Phoenician inscription, is said to have given the Greeks their word for book?

Byblos: King Ahiram's coffin, carved there about 1000 BC, carries the inscription, and because Egyptian papyrus reached the Greeks through the port its name is thought to have passed to the material and then to books.

Which group did most to spread the Phoenician alphabet around the Mediterranean?

Traders: Phoenician merchants took their couple of dozen letters from port to port, and the peoples they did business with borrowed the signs and reshaped them for their own languages.

Mozart only wrote variations on the tune of 'The ABC Song'; in which country was the melody first published?

France: the tune was first published there in 1761 and became the song 'Ah! vous dirai-je, maman'; Mozart's variations came some twenty years later, and the alphabet words were copyrighted in Boston in 1835.

Mesrop Mashtots, a churchman and scholar, devised an alphabet around 405 AD that is still used by which nation?

Armenia: the first major work written in the new letters was a translation of the Bible, and Mashtots took on part of the translating himself.

Rotokas, whose 12-letter alphabet is often called the world's smallest, is spoken in which country?

Papua New Guinea: Rotokas belongs to the island of Bougainville, and the language has so few distinct sounds that a dozen plain Latin letters, with no accents, cover them all.

Which Polynesian language is written with just 13 letters, one of them the ʻokina?

Hawaiian: the ʻokina is the catch in the middle of 'uh-oh', and the missionaries who first printed the language settled its spelling by ballot in 1826, voting out b, d, r, t and v.

Which Cherokee man, inspired by European 'talking leaves', invented a syllabary for his language around 1821?

Sequoyah never learned to read or write English, yet his signs spread so fast that by 1828 the Cherokee had a newspaper of their own, the Cherokee Phoenix, printed in them.

Mkhedruli is the everyday script of which country, whose three alphabets are on UNESCO's heritage list?

Georgia: each of its three alphabets grew out of the one before, and the two older ones live on mainly in the Georgian Orthodox Church while Mkhedruli does the daily work.

Which Asian language gave up its old character script for a Latin alphabet first devised by Catholic missionaries?

Vietnamese: Portuguese Jesuits worked out the spelling in the 17th century, and for some three hundred years it ran alongside the older character script before replacing it in the 20th.

Which composer wrote piano variations on the melody English speakers use for the alphabet song?

Mozart was about 25 when he wrote the variations, and the same tune also carries 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' and 'Baa, Baa, Black Sheep'.

Which letter's English name records a time when it was treated as two copies of another letter?

W is called double-u because it began as a pair of that letter written side by side, and in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish its name means double-v instead.

Which computer key is named for moving a typewriter's mechanism to print capital letters?

Shift got its name on typewriters such as the 1878 Remington No. 2, where holding the key physically shifted the mechanism so one key could print a capital or a small letter.

Which tech giant reorganised itself in 2015 under a new parent company called Alphabet?

Google became one subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. that October, a restructuring that moved its side ventures out into separate companies.

Which name for the alphabet's last letter is usual in Canada and Australia, unlike the American 'zee'?

Zed is the name in most English-speaking countries, while zee began as a seventeenth-century English dialect form that took hold in American speech.

Which TV game show reveals five consonants and one vowel for free in its bonus round puzzle?

Wheel of Fortune has handed finalists the same free letters since October 1988, after which they add three more consonants and one more vowel.

Which children's TV series, launched in 1969, credited letters as each episode's sponsors?

Sesame Street copied the style of TV adverts, running short animated 'commercials' for letters and numbers because they held children's attention.

Which name is given to the small dot that sits on top of a lowercase i or j?

A tittle is the proper name for that dot, which is normally dropped when another accent takes its place, as in the letter í.

Which Roman general gave his name to a cipher that moves each letter three places along?

Julius Caesar used the code to protect messages of military significance, a habit recorded by the Roman historian Suetonius.

Which family group took a song titled 'ABC' to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1970?

The Jackson 5 knocked the Beatles' Let It Be off the top spot that April, the second of four chart-toppers the brothers scored in 1970.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter, which letter must Hester Prynne wear as punishment?

A stands for adultery in the 1850 novel, which was one of the first mass-produced books in the United States.

Which two letter keys on a computer keyboard carry small raised bumps to guide touch typists?

F and J sit under the index fingers on the home row, so typists can find their starting position by feel without looking down.

Which term for capital letters comes from the drawer where printers kept that set of metal type?

Upper case was the higher of two shallow trays on a printer's rack, and the small letters were stored in the one below it.

Which term describes a word made by rearranging the letters of another, like 'listen' and 'silent'?

An anagram uses all the original letters exactly once, and in the tile game Anagrams players steal rivals' words by rearranging and extending them.

Which language's alphabet includes ñ, a letter that began as a scribe's shorthand for a double n?

Spanish scribes wrote the second n as a small wavy line above the first, and that shorthand mark grew into a separate letter that follows n in the alphabet.

Which term describes a pair of letters that together spell a single sound, like 'sh' in 'ship'?

A digraph need not sit side by side: in 'cake', the first vowel and the silent last letter work as a pair.

Which letter stands for five hundred in Roman numerals, half the value of the letter M?

D is one of only seven letters the Roman system needs, and the numerals have outlived the empire on clock faces.

Which daily word game, bought by The New York Times in 2022, has players guess a five-letter word?

Wordle began as a private project that software engineer Josh Wardle built for his partner, before its public release in October 2021.

Which fantasy author invented the Tengwar script and credited it to an Elf named Fëanor?

J. R. R. Tolkien mostly used the flowing letters to write English, as most of his surviving samples show.

Which letter is written but not pronounced in the words lamb, bomb, debt and doubt?

B was written into debt and doubt by later scribes to echo the Latin words behind them, a spelling fix that never changed how the words were said.

Which language's alphabet includes the extra letter ß, known to its speakers as Eszett?

German is the only language that uses it, and Swiss writers dropped the letter during the twentieth century in favour of a plain double letter.

Which paper-and-pencil game has players guess a word letter by letter before a stick figure is finished?

Hangman has unknown origins, though a variant appears in a book of children's games that Alice Gomme assembled in 1894.

Which name is given to the small finishing strokes on letters in typefaces such as Times New Roman?

Serifs may date from Roman stonework: on one widely accepted theory, carvers followed letters first painted with a brush, which flared at the stroke ends.

Which children's author published an ABC book in 1963 alongside his book Hop on Pop?

Dr. Seuss's ABC went on to rank among his best-selling books of all time, and both titles appeared in the Beginner Books line for new readers.

Which letter did a Roman schoolmaster add to the alphabet in the third century BC as a variant of C?

G is credited to the freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, who needed a separate sign for a sound C had been covering.

Which American founding father proposed a new alphabet that dropped some letters and invented others?

Benjamin Franklin's 1768 scheme was one of the earlier proposed spelling reforms for English, with new letters for sounds such as sh, ng and th.

Which country replaced its Arabic-based script with a new 29-letter alphabet in 1928?

Turkey went further and barred three letters missing from the new alphabet from official documents, a ban that lasted until 2013.

In English-language Scrabble, which letter is the only tile worth exactly five points?

K appears just once in the standard bag of 100 tiles, sitting alone between the four-point and eight-point letters.

Which mark is the small hook written beneath the c in borrowed words such as façade?

A cedilla is often left out in English, where 'facade' is common because standard keyboards have no key for ç.

In which 1989 picture book do the lowercase letters climb a coconut tree until they all fall out?

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom teaches the alphabet in rhyming couplets, and it reached The New York Times children's best-seller list in 2000.

Which letter began as a Phoenician drawing of a human eye and was named with the word for 'eye'?

O has kept much the same shape ever since, although the sign first stood for a consonant, not a vowel.

Which crime novelist titled her Kinsey Millhone mysteries after letters, beginning with 'A' Is for Alibi?

Sue Grafton planned to finish with a book for the last letter, but she died in 2017 after reaching Y, leaving the alphabet one short.

Which signalling system spells out letters by holding two hand flags at different angles?

Semaphore is used at sea when ships resupply side by side, with lighted wands replacing the flags at night.

Which New York borough has a neighbourhood nicknamed Alphabet City after its four single-letter avenues?

Manhattan's 1811 street plan added the lettered avenues only where the island widens east of First Avenue.

The Phoenicians, whose alphabet spread around the Mediterranean, lived mainly in which modern country?

Lebanon was home to independent city-states such as Byblos, Sidon and Tyre, and the Phoenicians apparently had no name for their land as a whole.

Which invented language uses an alphabet that L. L. Zamenhof built on the rule of one letter, one sound?

Esperanto is written with twenty-eight letters, and Zamenhof named each consonant by adding a single vowel to the end of it.

Which term do typographers use for adjusting the space between two specific letters in a font?

Kerning is easily mixed up with tracking, which adjusts the spacing evenly across a whole run of characters.

Which name do linguists give to ə, a rotated lowercase letter that marks a weak, unstressed vowel sound?

Schwa is the name for the reduced vowel in unstressed English syllables, and the symbol often stands in for any indistinct vowel.

Which playwright posthumously funded a new alphabet for English, drawn by signwriter Kingsley Read?

George Bernard Shaw was a vocal critic of English spelling and for years wrote his own literary works in Pitman shorthand.

Which church leader in Utah drove the creation of the Deseret alphabet to reform English spelling?

Brigham Young nearly bought 200 pounds of lead type in 1847 to print books in Pitman's phonetic spelling before the new letters were devised.

Which country holds most surviving stones carved in Ogham, an alphabet of strokes cut along a stone's edge?

Ireland's counties of Cork and Kerry alone hold well over half of the island's ogham stones, which are read upward from the bottom left.

Which Asian country's traditional script is written top to bottom in lines that run left to right?

Mongolia owes the script to Tata-tonga, a Uyghur scribe captured by Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century, who adapted his own people's alphabet for it.

Which emperor's patronage produced Carolingian minuscule, the script behind modern lowercase letters?

Charlemagne was never fully literate himself, but he valued a uniform script for running his empire and brought the scholar Alcuin of York to lead his palace school.

Which monument in Rome, completed in AD 113, bears the best-known Roman square capital letters?

Trajan's Column carries an inscription meant to be read from below, so the letters in its top lines were cut slightly larger than those at the bottom.

Which handled alphabet tablet, protected by a translucent sheet, was in common use in England by 1450?

A hornbook took its name from the thin layer of animal horn that covered and protected the lettered sheet.

Which country's sign language spells out letters with two hands, unlike the one-handed American system?

Britain's two-handed alphabet was also taken up by Indo-Pakistani Sign Language, whose vocabulary and grammar grew up separately.

Which Wisconsin newspaper editor devised the QWERTY keyboard layout in the early 1870s?

Christopher Sholes built his first writing machine with a piano-like keyboard whose two rows of characters ran in alphabetical order.

Which term describes a word such as 'madam' or 'racecar' that reads the same backwards as forwards?

A palindrome takes its name from Greek words meaning 'running back again', and a five-word Latin one was found scratched on a column in Pompeii.

Which method teaches beginners to read by linking written letters to the sounds of spoken language?

Phonics comes in several forms; in the synthetic kind, pupils learn the sound each letter stands for and blend them to pronounce a word.

Which style of handwriting joins the letters of each word in a flowing line to speed up writing?

Cursive is also called joined-up writing, and its casual forms mix the joins with occasional lifts of the pen.