26 fascinating facts about every letter in the English alphabet

Before the 1500s, u and v were used interchangeably as a vowel or a consonant. A French educational reformer helped change that in 1557 when he started using u exclusively as a vowel and v as the consonant.

V is the only letter in the English language that is never silent, according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Think about it: even unusual letters like Z and J are silent in words we have borrowed from foreign languages, such as marijuana (originally a Spanish word) and laissez-faire (French).

If you have ever wondered why we call it a ‘double-u’ instead of ‘double-v,’ you’re not alone. However, the explanation is surprisingly simple. Because the Latin alphabet did not have a letter to represent the sound /w/ in Old English, 7th-century scribes just wrote it as ‘uu.’ The double-u symbol eventually meshed together to form the letter W.

From ‘X marks the spot’ to ‘solve for x,’ this is the go-to letter to represent something unknown. The idea is believed to have come from mathematician René Descartes, who used the last three letters of the alphabet to represent unknown quantities in his book The Geometry. He chose a, b, and c to stand for known quantities.

Can you pass this high school English quiz? Find out here.

The switch-hitter in the alphabet, y functions as both a vowel and a consonant. The Oxford English Dictionary actually calls it a semivowel because while the letter stops your breath in words such as yell and young – making it a consonant – it also creates an open vocal sound in words such as myth or hymn.

Believe it or not, the letter Z has not always been the last letter of the alphabet; in the Greek alphabet, it had a respectable place at number seven.

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Source: RD.com