Do all letters of the English alphabet have phoneticised dictionary entries? I'm thinking of the word Vee for the letter V or Zed for the letter Z? For example is there an entry for H? Aitch?
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There are no standard spellings for the alphabet letters. They are their own standard, and they appear first in each alphabetic list. There are lot of unofficial eye spellings like vee or zed, but they're nonce forms.– John LawlerCommented Jan 24, 2019 at 15:25
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Those spelled-out letters are very important for the game Scrabble. Two-letter words like ef and ar, for example. Yes, aitch is found in enough dictionaries to be allowed in Scrabble.– GEdgarCommented Jan 24, 2019 at 15:48
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Welcome to EL&U. As John Lawler and GEdgar note, there is no universally agreed-upon spelling for every letter. Some initialisms have been lexicalized and that may influence what is recognized as a phonetic spelling, e.g. emcee or deejay, but consider also that letters may be pronounced differently by different people, e.g. zed vs. zee, aitch vs. haitch.– chosterCommented Jan 24, 2019 at 16:48
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@JohnLawler "nonce" is not a synonym for "unofficial". Letter spellings are used in multiple places, and thus are not nonce.– AcccumulationCommented Jan 24, 2019 at 17:09
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@Accumulation Yes, that I was getting at in my question. "Vee" has its own dictionary entry, used to describe anything "V" shaped.– oweyddCommented Jan 24, 2019 at 17:20
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1 Answer
In a comment, John Lawler wrote:
There are no standard spellings for the alphabet letters. They are their own standard, and they appear first in each alphabetic list. There are lot of unofficial eye spellings like vee or zed, but they're nonce forms.