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Word Source: Names of Letters

If you are a player of words games, you are probably full of curiosity and always looking for new words you can play or find.  The "Word Source" series will take one source of words you may not have thought of before, and give a lot to think about.

I can't promise that all of these are in any one specific dictionary, and various games use their own dictionaries or shared online dictionaries.  You can search the Scrabble dictionary here.

For this first installment, here are the names of the letters of the alphabet in English.  In these lists, the ones marked with a star have collided with other words, so these won't be additions to a vocabulary, and I confirmed that the ones marked with a + are in the Scrabble dictionary right now.

A (some sources have AY as a variant but that is more commonly a variant of AYE).

BEE*

CEE+

DEE+

E (some sources have EE)

EF+ or EFF

GEE*

AITCH+ or HAITCH

I

JAY*

KAY+

EL* or ELL*

EM+

EN+

O

PEE*

CUE*

AR+

ESS+

TEE+*

U

VEE+

DOUBLE-U

EX+*

WY+

ZEE+ or ZED+

When you include plurals there are a lot of very strange looking, playable combinations, like AYS, CEES+, EES, EFS+, AITCHES+, EMS+, ENS+, ARS+, ESSES+, VEES+, WYES+ and ZEES+.

EM and EN are interesting, because those words indicate not just the letter, but in typography, the width of those letters as a unit of measure.

DOUBLE-U is not very game-friendly due to the hyphenation.

The plural WYES is interesting because it is the plural of both WY (the letter) and WYE, which is a railroad track pattern (shaped like a Y) and a kind of plumbing pipe.

So, not only are these good words to use for points, you can see how even in such a simple area, there is no consensus.  To me, having the vowels be their own names is the pattern that makes sense, and it looks like the Scrabble dictionary agrees, since it does not have the plurals.

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