26 fascinating facts about every letter in the English alphabet

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.

Grab paper and pen and start writing down every number as a word. Do you notice one missing letter? If you kept going, you wouldn’t use a single letter b until you reached one billion.

Check out these synonyms that will make you a better writer.

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.

Contrary to popular belief, the letter D in D-day does not stand for ‘doom’ or ‘disaster’ – it simply stands for ‘day.’ The military marks important operations and invasions with a D as a placeholder. (So June 5, 1944, was D-1.)

Meet the ‘Smith’ of the English alphabet – e is used more often than any other letter. It appears in 11 per cent of all words, according to an analysis of more than 240,000 entries in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

Find out which new words have been added to the dictionary for 2021.

Anyone educated in today’s school system knows that the lowest grade you can get is an F. The low-water mark, however, used to be represented by the letter E. When Mount Holyoke College administrators 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.’

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.

H might be the most hated letter in Britain, according to author Michael Rosen. 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.

Don’t miss these magical reasons to visit Ireland.

Funny enough, the dot over the letters ‘i’ and ‘j’ actually has a name. It is called a tittle.

This is one of the two letters that do not appear on the periodic table. (Q is the other.) Invented in 1524 by an Italian, J was also the last letter to be added to the alphabet.