The Secret Lives Of Letters

- Brooke Nelson

A THE CAPITAL A hasn’t always looked the way it does now. In ancient Semitic languages, the letter was upside down, which created a symbol that resembled a steer with horns.

B 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.

C BENJAMIN Franklin wanted to banish c from the alphabet—along with j, q, w, x, and y—and replace them with six letters he’d invented himself. He claimed that he could simplify the English language.

D CONTRARY TO popular belief, the D in D-day does not stand for “doom” or “death”—it stands for “day.” The military marks important operations and invasions with a D as a placeholder. (So June 5, 1944, was D-1.)

E MEET THE “Smith” of the English alphabet—e is used more often than any other letter. It appears in 11 percent of all words, according to an analysis of more than 240,000 entries in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

F 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.” F more obviously stands for “fail.”

G BOTH G and