Unfortunately, dear reader, we have almost reached the end of our journey through the alphabet. Thank you for joining us as we delve into the history of the symbols without which we would be unable to write this.

Last, and least (used, that is), we come to the letter Z. The letter has been largely spurned by the Brits, but is loved by Americans, thanks to a certain Noah Webster. (Yes, the one that came up with Webster’s dictionary, in case you were wondering.) Webster favoured (or favored, as he would write) spelling reform, and can be credited with many of the differences between American and British spellings. So where we would spell some words with the suffix ‘ise’, Americans would normally use ‘ize’. The British spelling comes from French, but America took inspiration from Greek instead. The letter S has been Z’s main rival throughout the years, often taking its rightful spot. For example, have you ever noticed that we write ‘snooze’ but not ‘chooze’?

The letter Z sometimes appears in its ‘long tailed’ form, appearing as it does in the image.This variant of the letter sometimes appears in the exact same form as the numeric character for the number three.

‘Catching some Zs’ is an American idiom, used to mean ‘getting some sleep’. This comes from the tradition of using the letter to express snoring sounds (normally written as ‘Zzzzzz’ in animations). But Z can also ...

Welcome to the penultimate post from our amazing alphabet blog series! It has been a great adventure to discover what is behind the characters we use every day. And now here we are to the fabulous Y, so let’s have a closer look.

As you have probably noticed already, the Y is in the shape of a fork, so the French scholar Geofroy Tory thought that it was a suitable symbol to represent the choice between vice and virtue. In the AGESCI, the Italian Catholic Scouts and Guides, the symbol of the section of youngsters aged 17 and over is a fork, which is called forcola. Its two branches represent the choice that scouts and guides make between becoming a scout leader or leaving the movement. However, there are also several different places where we can find a Y, can you think of any?

Y is the only letter commonly used as both vowel and consonant in English. As a vowel, we can think of the different sounds of myth, messy and myrtle, whereas as a consonant we see y in youth or yearning. It also has something in common with its cousin W, as they are the only semivowels in English phonetics. You have a semivowel when a letter’s pronunciation approaches a vowel sound in the way it uses the throat and vocal chords.

Although in English Y is quite a widespread ...

The X Files? Xbox? It’s only really been in the last twenty years or so that the letter X has really enjoyed a more mellowed existence…prior to this it was known more for X-rated films, the X label on poison bottles…

Its use is relatively scarce as well; in printed English, it ranks roughly 2^nd or 3^rd to last, just above Z. As an initial letter, X comes last.

The most common use for X is its long-established roles as denoting unknown or unrevealed mathematical quantities…remember algebra? The first use of X in this way was by Descartes in 1637 when he assigned the letters X, Y and Z to symbolize any three unknowns in a geometric equation. The German physicist, Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen discovered a strange new radiation and named it X-ray as he didn’t know what it contained.

X is also used in legal documents to censor somebody’s name or guard against branding. In 1968 the Motion Picture Association of America introduced lettered ratings in order to inform cinema audiences of the level of picture they were going to see and to any instances of sex, profanity or violence. Of the more adult end of the film spectrum, R stood for ‘restricted’ whilst X was reserved for ‘extreme’ films, more on a par with pornography. In this way, the letter X, more or less overnight in the American consciousness, came to symbolize explicit, uninhibited ...

“Double U” is the only English letter name with more than one syllable, except for the occasionally used, though somewhat archaic, œ. It is also the only English letter whose name is not pronounced with any of the sounds that the letter typically makes.

For years, it remained an outsider, not really considered part of the Latin alphabet proper, expressed here by Valenmtin Ickelsamer in the 16th century, who complained that “Poor W is so infamous and unknown that many barely know either its name or its shape, not those who aspire to being Latinists, as they have no need of it, nor do the Germans, not even the schoolmasters, know what to do with it or how to call it…”

In Europe, there are only a few languages that use W in native words and all are located in a central-western European zone between Cornwall and Poland. In Middle High German, the West Germanic phoneme W became realized as V and this is why the German W today represents that sound.

In the alphabets of most modern Romance languages, W is used very little. When a spelling for W in a native word is needed, a spelling from the native alphabet, such as V, U, or OU, can be used instead.
Unlike its use in other languages, the letter is used in Welsh and Cornish to represent the vowel U.

In the Finnish alphabet, W is seen as a variant of V ...

V is one of the youngest letters of our alphabet (it shares this distinction with J) and was only fully accepted into the alphabet in the mid-19th century. It did appear in print prior to this however, but was seen more as the consonantal variation of U rather than a letter in its own right. V was born from a need to represent new sounds that were forming in the Romance languages after the fall of the Roman Empire (A.D. 500).
The Romans managed just fine though with 23 letters…but, was there not a Roman V? Does the goddess Venus ring any bells? Vesuvius? Is Julius Caeser not famous for his utterance, ‘veni, vidi, vici’ (I came, I saw, I conquered)? In fact, the Roman letter V used in those examples was never a V. It was U, written as V, and pronounced like ‘w’….blimey!

The sounds for ‘f’ and ‘v’ are as close as two consonants can be. Say them to yourself…they are classed as dento-labial fricatives and involve air being pushed through the barrier that resting your front teeth on your lower lip creates. The difference is that ‘v’ involves the use of the vocal chords while ‘f’ does not. In Old English, the letter F was used for both letters.

In medieval writing there was a tug of war between the two letters U and V; a written U could signify ...