26 fascinating facts about every letter in the English alphabet

With the possible exception of L (see below), K is the most notorious letter in sports. It’s how baseball fans record a strikeout. (When the first box score was written back in 1859, S was used to indicate a sacrifice; K was plucked from the end of struck.)

The NFL has traditionally used Roman ­numerals to denote the number of the Big Game, but for the 50th Super Bowl, they decided to go with just the number 50. Why? Sports fans use the letters W and L as shorthand for ‘win’ and ‘loss.’ Because the Roman numeral for 50 is L, the NFL worried that Super Bowl L would be, in PR terms, a big loser.

Find out why 7 is considered a lucky number.

You can’t say the letter M without your lips touching. Go ahead and try it!

The letter n was originally associated with water – the Phoenician word for n was nun, which later became the Aramaic word for ‘fish.’ In fact, the capital N got its shape because it was a pictorial representation of a crashing wave.

Check out these signs you’re drinking too much water.

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.

This may be the most versatile letter in English. It’s the only consonant that needs no help in forming a word sandwich with any vowel: pap, pep, pip, pop, pup.

This is the only letter in the English language that is never silent. Read on to find out.

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.

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.

Check out these facts about learning a new language.

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.’

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 boarding school.