Timeline for Is there a formal spelling for the English letter names?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 10 at 7:37 | comment | added | Stuart F | Some have common spellings, like "ess" which is used for an S-shaped thing. "Zed"/"zee" is used similarly, and there are terms in the dictionary for an L-shaped building/wing, though "I-beam" is used for an I-shaped thing. | |
| Feb 25, 2020 at 12:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackEnglish/status/1232274219272167424 | ||
| Feb 24, 2020 at 14:23 | history | edited | tchrist♦ |
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| Feb 24, 2020 at 14:22 | answer | added | tchrist♦ | timeline score: -1 | |
| Feb 24, 2020 at 14:20 | answer | added | tchrist♦ | timeline score: 1 | |
| Nov 22, 2019 at 18:20 | comment | added | Peter Shor | Wiktionary has a list. It's not universally agreed on, though. | |
| Aug 28, 2016 at 19:40 | history | edited | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
copyedit; please don't use `back quoted` on ELU. This is not code. Set words used as words in italic.
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| Aug 28, 2016 at 19:18 | answer | added | LEX | timeline score: -4 | |
| Jan 9, 2016 at 22:30 | answer | added | candied_orange | timeline score: 8 | |
| Aug 23, 2015 at 20:49 | comment | added | herisson | Maybe. There are some general trends, like "tee" for "T" and other rhyming words, and generally you start them out with the actual letter, so we'd be more likely to write "cee" for "C." For the vowels, you just use the vowel letter by itself. I know there's some guy on Wikipedia who insists that each letter has a name with a proper spelling, so it's listed there. Apparently this user gets these supposedly standard names from the Oxford English Dictionary. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_alphabet#Letter_names | |
| Aug 23, 2015 at 19:15 | comment | added | John Lawler |
I always want to pronounce W as /'wəbəlyu/. It's particularly awful in abbreviations like the one for Western Washington University here in Bellingham. Western Washington University contains 10 syllables, but Double-U Double-U U contains 7; not much saving there; I tend to pronounce it as /'wuwu/.
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| Aug 23, 2015 at 19:01 | comment | added | Brian Donovan | Usual orthography for the names of the letters is just to write the letter itself, capitalized and/or italicized. (These forms are also just about the only ones that really need a greengrocer's apostrophe, since "straight As" does not immediately suggest to the reader a perfect academic record.) One exception, particularly well established, is "aitch" for H. | |
| Aug 23, 2015 at 18:54 | comment | added | John Lawler |
No, not really. English spelling is so awful at recording pronunciation that there are too many ways to represent the pronounced letter names, and no ways that are unambiguous. So you see ee, ie, e, i, for instance for E, o, oh, ow, ou for O, etc. Use phonemic symbols if you need accurate rendition of English sounds.
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| Aug 23, 2015 at 18:48 | history | asked | Adam Matan | CC BY-SA 3.0 |