James from Trabuco Canyon, California, learns that there’s a proper way to spell the letters of the alphabet. The letter J is spelled jay and H is spelled aitch. His own name would be spelled out as jay aye em ee ess. The letter Y is spelled wye. Such spellings sometimes help provide clarity, as when court reporters need to indicate that a speaker was spelling out a word letter by letter. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Spelling the Letters of the Alphabet”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is James Bell. I’m calling from Tribuco Canyon, California.
Welcome.
What can we do for you, James?
I had a question that was, how would you spell a letter and if it’s possible?
You mean like the letters of the alphabet?
Yeah.
How do you spell the letters of the alphabet? Any guesses?
My dad told me something about like just the letter by itself.
Sometimes, yeah.
I was wondering if there was like a proper way to spell like the letter J.
That’s a good question.
I think it’s something that most people don’t think about.
But the answer is yes.
All of our letters, as far as I know, have at least one way to spell them.
Some of them have more than one.
So J is spelled like the bird, J-A-Y.
Words like H are even more interesting to me.
Do you know how to spell H?
I do not.
It’s A-I-T-C-H, at least in this country, in the United States, where we don’t pronounce it as H.
Some parts of the world, they say H, so they spell it H-I-T-C-H.
And then, so every letter’s got a way to spell it.
So your name is James, so James is J-A-Y, and A is usually either just the letter A or A-Y-E, although that’s pronounced I.
M is E-M, and E is E-E, usually, or sometimes just the letter E.
And then S is ESS, James.
Yeah.
Do you want to know the other weird one besides age, at least for me, is Y.
The letter Y is spelled W-Y-E, which is really unusual, isn’t it?
Yeah.
James, what got you to wondering about all this?
Most people don’t think about it.
Well, I was just watching this show and I thought I was just thinking about the alphabet and just the English language in general.
And I thought about spelling the alphabet or like spelling a certain letter.
And then that got me wondering.
That’s good.
That’s great.
You sound like one of our listeners.
I appreciate you thinking about it, James.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, take care of yourself and thanks for calling.
Call us again sometime.
All right?
All right.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
One of the reasons that you need to spell letters is particularly for documents where you’re repeating something that someone else has had, say a transcription, right?
So if I said to you J-A-Y and there was a court reporter here, what do they write down?
Do they write J-A-Y? Possibly, but they more likely would spell out J-A-Y, J-A-Y space, letter A space, W-Y-E, to indicate that I said them as letters and not as a word.
Does that make sense?
Sometimes you indicate through capitalization you J-A-Y, and that shows that I spelled it out.
But court reporters may have their own traditions and styles that they do.
And as I recall, also in plumbing, I mean, you can look at plumbing catalogs and there would be a Y-type, right?
W-Y-E.
Yeah, that’s interesting.
Although you often find just like in the U-turn, you find it’s spelled with the U.
The letter U.
Right, to represent the shape.
And so often a Y joint or an L joint in hardware catalogs is just spelled with the letter and not the letter spelled out as a word.
Right.
Complicated.
Spelling letters is weird because it’s kind of like counting numbers.
It’s kind of self-referential.
Yeah.
Self-flicking ice cream cone.
You can keep spelling the letters that spell the letters that spell the letters.
Oh, my gosh.
Like the cream of wheat box, right?
It’s fractal.
