English alphabet: the 26 letters, their names and how to spell a word aloud

Twenty-six letters, five vowel letters and two that change sides

The English alphabet is the Latin alphabet with nothing added: 26 letters, each with a capital and a small form, as Wikipedia’s article on the English alphabet puts it. J and U became separate letters only in the 16th century, and accents appear mainly in loanwords such as naïve and façade. So there is nothing extra to memorise. The shapes are familiar; the names are new.

Wikipedia counts five vowel letters, A, E, I, O and U, and nineteen consonant letters, then adds that W and Y can work as either. Y is a consonant at the start of young and a vowel in myth. W acts as a vowel only in rare borrowings such as the Welsh word cwm, and even I and U stand for consonant sounds in onion and quail. Vowel and consonant describe the job a letter does in a word, not the letter itself.

Letter names in sound groups: the bee rhymes, the egg family and the loners

Five groups and two loners are easier than twenty-six names. Sorted by the vowel in the names from Wikipedia’s table, eight letters end in the ee of bee: B, C, D, E, G, P, T and V. Six start with the short e of egg and close on a consonant: F, L, M, N, S and X, said ef, el, em, en, ess and ex. These two families of the english alphabet already cover fourteen letters.

Four letters share the vowel of day: A, H, J and K, named a, aitch, jay and kay. I and Y share the sound of eye, and Y is called wy. Q, U and W end in the sound of you: cue, u and double-u, the only standard name longer than one syllable. O sounds like the word owe, and R is said ar. Learn the groups, not the order.

Two names change with geography. Z is zed in British, Irish and Commonwealth English and zee in American English, so it joins the egg family in London and the bee family in New York. H is aitch, while haitch, with an h sound at the start, is the usual form in Australian, Irish and New Zealand English, Wikipedia notes. Both are correct; what helps a listener is one model, kept every time.

Five vowel letters for up to twenty vowel sounds, and why c in cat is not see

Wikipedia’s article on English orthography gives the numbers: depending on the dialect, English has 24 to 27 consonant phonemes and 13 to 20 vowels, all written with 26 letters. Each vowel letter therefore does several jobs: a sounds different in hat and hate, and the only change on the page is a silent e. The same article counts up to 24 spellings for the vowel of too. How a word sounds is a job for its transcription and audio.

A letter’s name is a label for spelling; its sound is what it does inside a word. C is called see, yet it gives a k in cat and, before e, i and y, usually an s, as in city and cellar. G is called gee but is hard in get and girl and soft in gin and gentle. The k in knife and the w in wrong are not said at all. Reading and spelling aloud are therefore two separate skills.

Look-alike letters and swapped names: B, H, P, E, I, G and J

For a reader of Cyrillic the first trap is shape. Wikipedia’s article on homoglyphs notes that in many typefaces the Latin letters a, B, c, e, H, K, o, p, T, x and y look exactly like Cyrillic ones. In English, though, B is bee and not ve, H is aitch and not en, P is pee and not er, and y is wy. The eye sees a familiar letter, and the mouth says its old name.

The second trap, sound, catches speakers of Russian, Spanish and French alike. The English name of E is close to the sound their alphabets give to I, while English I sounds like ai, so the two get swapped in dictation. Wikipedia’s article on French orthography gives gé for G and ji for J, close to the reverse of English gee and jay, and W is doublevé in French. Drill the pairs E and I, G and J side by side until each name sticks.

Spelling your name aloud on the phone, double letters included

The alphabet earns its keep when someone asks you to spell a word. An A1 listening exercise on the British Council’s LearnEnglish Teens site, Spelling names, shows the convention: one speaker spells R-E-E-V-E-S, the other confirms R-double E-V-E-S. Saying double before two identical letters makes the pair hard to miss. Another British Council page, How do you spell it, lists the double letters met most often: ss, ee, tt, ff, ll, mm and oo.

Dictate a surname in groups of three or four letters with a short pause. Then ask for it to be read back, listening for neighbours such as B and P or M and N. In an email address, at stands for the @ sign and dot for the full stop. Spell the words you really use, your street and city included, until they come out without a pause.

The ICAO spelling alphabet from Alfa to Zulu for noisy lines

On a bad line B, D, P, T and V blur. Their names all end in the same ee. ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization, explains on its history page that a spelling alphabet clarifies the parts of a message that contain letters and numbers, and that short, simple words reduce misunderstandings. Each letter gets a word, listed in Wikipedia’s article on the NATO phonetic alphabet, as the set is often called: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee and Zulu.

ICAO’s page says Jean-Paul Vinay of the Université de Montréal worked on the list in 1948 and 1949, and that it was adopted on 1 November 1951. Problems followed, ICAO re-examined it in 1952, speakers from 31 countries tested it, and five words changed: Coca, Metro, Nectar, Union and Extra became Charlie, Mike, November, Uniform and X-ray. The final version came into force on 1 March 1956. Each word had to exist in English, French and Spanish and carry no negative meaning, which is why Alfa takes an f and Juliett a double t: speakers of other languages then say them correctly.

Capital letters in English: I, weekdays, months and nationalities

The British Council’s LearnEnglish page on capital letters is plain: a capital starts a sentence and is used for the pronoun I. Days of the week, months and festivals take one, seasons do not, so Thursday and April, yet summer. Wikipedia’s article on capitalisation adds that me, my and mine stay small. It also notes that almost all languages other than German and Luxembourgish write days, months and languages with a small letter.

The same LearnEnglish page covers the rest. Names of people and places take capitals, streets, planets and countries included, and so do words that come from place names: languages, nationalities and adjectives, as in its example Some Canadians speak French. Organisations, the main words of book and film titles, and a job title placed before a name, as in President Alvi, are capitalised too. Typical slips are english, monday and russian written small.

Learning the English alphabet this week, and what the course adds

The alphabet is a few days of work, and it can be done alone. Day one: the names by sound groups, said aloud. Day two: your name, street and email, recorded and played back the next morning. Day three: the ICAO words for your own letters, plus the look, cover, write and check routine from the British Council’s How do you spell it page for words with double letters. Songs help some people; either way, end by spelling something real to a real person.

The English in 213 Days course of VITON13 SCHOOL has no separate alphabet lesson: its first level starts with greetings and the verb to be. What it adds is daily spelling practice. Each level brings 13 new words with sound, an IPA transcription and an example, and a dictation in which the app reads sentences aloud. At levels 3, 6, 14 and several later ones the mini-game is a spelling bee, where you hear a word and type it. Explanations come in Russian, French, Spanish, German or Portuguese, chosen in the classroom.

The first three levels open without payment or sign-in, and a free placement test shows which level to start from. If your own name still trips you up, give the english alphabet those few days first and let the course keep the habit going. If not, take the test and start where it points. Progress shows in one moment: a stranger on the phone spells your name right first time.