The word alphabet is a joining of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. The Greeks inherited their letters from the Phoenicians, who probably took their alpha from the Hebrew aleph, “ox.”
From alpha to omega,
You can bet the alphabet,
Like a painting done by Degas,
Will leap and pirouette.
See dancing words, entrancing words,
Sterling words unfurling.
Watch prancing words, enhancing words,
Whirling, twirling, swirling.
One species of language lover sees words as collections of letters to be juggled, shuffled, riffled and flipped. Lovers of logology — the art and craft of letter play — are spellbound by the fact that TWENTY-NINE is spelled with capital letters made of straight lines only — 29 of them, to be exact! They swoon at the revelation that if you add up the number of letters in a deck of cards — ace king queen jack ten nine eight seven six five four three two — the total comes to 52, the exact number of cards in that deck.
They fall heels over head in love with temperamentally — a snowball word that can be cleft into five words that are one-, two-, three-, four-, and five-letters long: t, em, per, amen, tally. They adore the fact that ambidextrous, from Latin roots meaning “using both the left and right hands with equal ease,” is a 12-letter word in which the first six letters — ambide — are drawn from the left-hand side of the alphabet and the second six letters — xtrous — are from the right side. Ambidextrous is also a 12-letter isogram, meaning that no letter is repeated. The word features all five major vowels, almost in order, and remains an isogram with a sixth vowel in ambidextrously.
Those who dance with the alphabet point to sequoia as the shortest word that contains the five major vowels and to facetiously as the most common word that includes the five major vowels and y in alphabetical order. They delight in the fact that if you select only from the top row of letters on a standard qwerty keyboard, you can type out the word typewriter.
Inspired by the word bookkeeper, with its three consecutive pairs of double letters, letter engineers fantasize about a biologist at the San Diego Zoo who helps maintain raccoon habitats She’s a raccoon nook keeper — six consecutive sets of double letter. Another scientist at the zoo studies the liquids secreted by chickadee eggs. He’s a chickadee egg goo-ologist — and, presto, we gaze upon three consecutive pairs of triple letters.
One of the mightiest challenges for the intrepid logologist is to construct the perfect pangram — a sentence that employs every letter in the alphabet at least once. The most famous exhibit is The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog, which many readers will remember from their typing days. Since that 33-letter statement was born, many shorter ones have bounded onto the letter-perfect stage:
- Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs. (32 letters)
- Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz. (31)
- How quickly daft jumping zebras vex. (30)
- Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim. (29)
- Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud. (28)
- Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymph. (27)
And — glory be! — cast your eyes upon two 26-letter Peter Pangrams:
- Mr. Jock, TV quiz Ph. D., bags few lynx.
- The glib czar junks my VW Fox PDQ.
If you can come up with a 26-letter pangram that makes easy sense and doesn’t resort to initials, names and mutant words, wing it to me, and I’ll make you famous.
Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com