Interesting word trivia here, consonant letters can be spelled out. These are valid words according to the dictionary and are playable in Scrabble. Vowels don’t have spellings that I can find.
I think it’s a little bogus that these spellings include the letter they are spelling, but I didn’t create the rules.
bee, cee, dee, ef, gee, aitch, jay, kay, el, em, en, pee, cue, ar, ess, tee, vee, double-u, ex, wye, zee
I first learned of this several years back after seeing a kid in the National Spelling Bee go home after getting confronted with spelling the letter H. He/she had never heard of being able to spell letters and was totally blindsided.
UPDATE: I see that Robot Wisdom has asked, “Which two consonants can be spelled without using themselves?”
F eph, G jea, Q cue, X ecks
Comment by Ross — August 21, 2005 @ 3:13 pm
Those (besides cue which is in my original list) don’t seem to be in the dictionary Ross.
Comment by Administrator — August 21, 2005 @ 4:12 pm
cay: a coastal reef or sandy islet
Comment by neal — August 21, 2005 @ 7:39 pm
Neal. Not sure what cay has to do with it (the letter is spelled kay). What did you mean?
Comment by Administrator — August 21, 2005 @ 7:53 pm
hmm, i didn’t realize that only the official spelling describing the actual letter was what you were looking for. “cay” is actual word that would be allowed in scrabble and which sounds exactly like “k.” a homonym, i suppose. and it doesn’t contain the letter “k.”
%^)
Comment by neal — August 21, 2005 @ 8:26 pm
Ah, I see where you’re going. Cay is still a new word to me, so thanks for the help.
Comment by Administrator — August 21, 2005 @ 8:30 pm
If ‘e’ is spelled ‘e’, why (y) isn’t ‘y’ spelled just ‘y’? And if ‘i’ can be spelled ‘aye’, it would qualify as a vowel that doesn’t use itself in spelling its name!
Comment by Rex — August 21, 2005 @ 9:01 pm
P is pee. Ha!
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http://joebardi.blogspot.com
Comment by Black Domina — August 21, 2005 @ 9:25 pm
C - see
Comment by Rick Miller — August 22, 2005 @ 8:22 am
…or sea
Comment by Kent — August 22, 2005 @ 10:49 am
Double U = W
Comment by James — August 22, 2005 @ 11:58 am
A = ??
E = ??
I = Aye
O = ??
U = Yew
Comment by Lyppy — August 22, 2005 @ 5:22 pm
Wouldn’t the vowel “o” be spelled “Oh”?
I always thought the vowel “e” was spelled “ee” since it is playable in Scrabble.
Anyways, I found this site very interesting as I am a scrabble addict and am always playing the computer on my Zire 71.
Comment by Cheryl — August 23, 2005 @ 11:22 pm
I worked in a shop now
Comment by salad — August 25, 2005 @ 6:17 pm
I looked up double-u online at the scrabble dictionary webiste.
http://www.hasbro.com/scrabble/pl/page.tools/dn/home.cfm
and even though it’s in the main dictionary, I think because it is hyphenated you cannot play it in a scrabble game. (but I could be wrong)
My husband is playing online in the next room and I overheard him ask how do you spell “g”, and hence I found your site and was happy to print the list out for him. Thanks.
Comment by Melanie — November 6, 2005 @ 10:52 pm
The Chicago Manual of Style uses “ell”, “eye” and “oh”, though at least in the instance I’m viewing (section 2.14 from 14th edition), they put these in quotation marks (as I did).
Comment by DaveC — April 7, 2008 @ 7:25 pm