A is an article, as in “a word,” as well as the first letter of the alphabet. Turns out that quite the majority of our letters are also words or sound like words:
A: a
B: be, bee
C: sea, see
G: gee
I: aye, eye, I
J: jay
K: quay
L: el
M: em
N: en
O: O, oh, owe
P: pea, pee
Q: cue, queue
R: are
T: tea, tee
U: ewe, yew, you
X: ex
Y: why
And more than half our letters, when pluralized, sound like words:
B’s: bees
C’s: seas, sees, seize
E’s: ease
G’s: geez
I’s: ayes, eyes
J’s: jays
K’s: quays
L’s: els
M’s: ems
N’s: ens
O’s: ohs, owes
P’s: peas, pease, pees
Q’s: cues, queues
T’s: teas, tease, tees
U’s: ewes, use, yews, youse
X’s: exes
Y’s: wise, whys
(See EXPEDIENCY, I, Q-TIPS, S, SILENT, W, X.)
Abecedarian is a letter-perfect word that means “pertaining to the alphabet, or alphabetically arranged.” This book is abecedarian in both senses of that definition.
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.
The old Cambodian alphabet, with seventy-four letters, is the world’s longest. Rotokas, spoken on the South Pacific island of Bougainville, uses only eleven letters.
Here’s a look at the letters in our alphabet from different vantage points:
Abracadabra is the longest common word with five a’s and features the four-letter abra at the beginning and the end, with a cad in between. The incantation may be derived from the Gnostic (early Christian) word Abraxas 
, Greek for “God,” the source of 365 emanations. Purportedly, the Greek letters for Abraxas add up to 365 when translated numerologically.
(See DEEDED, MISSISSIPPI, STRENGTHLESSNESS.)
Ace. In ace, the first, third, and fifth letters of the alphabet are joined. Ho hum, you yawn, and I agree because I haven’t been playing with a full deck. I’m a jack ace who ought to be dealt with, you say to yourself. But think on this: if you add up the number of letters in that deck—ace king queen jack ten nine eight seven six five four three two— the total comes to fifty-two!
Here’s a cute poser that involves ace: What is the pattern of the following names? The answer has nothing to do with the letters, syllables, or sounds in each name. Rather, the answer is “straightforward”:
Eddie Rickenbacker, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth, John F. Kennedy, Bo Derek
Answer: Ace, King, Queen, Jack, Ten
And how is marriage like a deck of cards?
Answer: You start off with two hearts and a diamond—and pretty soon you want to grab a club and use a spade.
(See DIE, JACKPOT.)
Adam is a Hebrew name that means “mankind.” Adam’s apple is so called because many men, but few women, exhibit a bulge of laryngeal cartilage in front of their throats. According to male-dominated folklore, Eve swallowed her apple without care or residue, while a chunk of the fruit stuck in the throat of the innocent and misled Adam.
Adam and Eve were the happiest couple in history. That’s because she couldn’t tell him how many other men she could have married—and he couldn’t tell her how much he loved his mother’s cooking.
When was Adam created? A little before Eve (“eve”). Eve was the first palindromic word, so Adam introduced himself with the first palindromic sentence:
Name Me Man
Backward and forward, as you will perceive
Read Adam’s first greeting to dear Mother Eve:
“Madam, I’m Adam.” Now we can conceive
That her answer was simply, “Eve, mad Adam, Eve.”
(See AGAMEMNON, BIBLE, CIVIC, KINNIKINNIK, NAPOLEON, PALINDROME, SENSUOUSNESS, WONTON, ZOONOOZ.)
Aegilops, meaning “an ulcer in part of the eye,” is an eight-letter word in which all letters proceed in alphabetical order with no double letters. But let’s admit that aegilops is pretty obscure. Using more common words, we can get up to six letters:
abhors
almost
begins
bijoux
biopsy
chimps
chinos
chintz
Agamemnon 
, the name of the mythical Greek king so prominent in the Iliad and other literary masterpieces, is constructed from three three-letter palindromes: Aga, mem, non.
(See ADAM, CIVIC, KINNIKINNIK, NAPOLEON, PALINDROME, SENSUOUSNESS, WONTON, ZOONOOZ.)
Ague is one of a few two-syllable words (“ay-gyoo”) that become one-syllable words when letters are added at their beginning, as in ague/vague or ague/plague. Other examples include:
aged/paged
naked/snaked
ragged/bragged
rugged/shrugged
winged/twinged
(See RODE.)
Ahoy originated as a word used to signal a ship or boat. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, insisted on ahoy as the correct way of answering the telephone, but it was his rival, inventor Thomas Edison, who coined what became the universal word to answer the telephone—hello, itself an alteration of the earlier English holla!, “Stop! Pay attention!” Nowadays, only Montgomery Burns, The Simpsons superannuated scrooge, uses “Ahoy-hoy” to take a telephone call.
(See GOOD-BYE.)
Ai. The shortest two-syllable words are the rather obscure aa, a rough lava; ai, a three-toed sloth; and Io, a moon of Jupiter.
Air is a member of the most populous family of homophones, words that are spelled differently but sound the same:
air
aire
Ayr
Ayer
ere
err
Eyre
heir
Note that err is a member of air family. While many pronunciation experts would argue that “to ‘air’ is human, to ‘ur’ divine” (thank you, Alexander Pope), the airy sounding of err is firmly established in American English.
(See SCENT.)
Akimbo, “with hands on hip and elbows bent outward,” may trace its ancestry to the Icelandic kengboginn, “bent hookwise, looking like a two-handled jug,” because that’s just what arms akimbo look like.
In addition to exciting the ear with its unusual sound, akimbo resides in two special categories of words:
First, akimbo is a deferential (or postpositive) adjective, one that must follow—and can never precede—the noun it modifies.
Second, akimbo is a prime example of a monogamous word—a word married to only one other word or phrase. Only arms can be akimbo, nothing else, just as only heroes can be unsung, breath can be bated, and thumbs twiddled. Umbrage can only be taken, aspersions cast, and nothings whispered (and sweet). These monogamous words have no life of their own beyond the specific idiom to which they are married.
(See GALORE.)
Alimony has been defined as “all the money” and “the bounty of mutiny.” The word actually traces back to the Latin alimonia, “nourish.” Hence, alimony is “eating money.” Originally alimony was closer to a widow’s pension or current welfare check than to a reluctant husband’s subsidy.
My nephew phoned me and asked me, as a professional brand name concocter, to come up with a slogan for his business card and website.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s review your basic life facts. You’re a family lawyer who’s involved in a lot of divorce cases, right?”
“Yes, Uncle Rich.”
“And you live in San Antonio.”
“Right.”
“I’ve got it: Remember the Alimony!”
Alkaline. Can anyone ever top the combination of chemistry and a famous name in alkaline? Cleave alkaline, and you’ll end up with Al Kaline, the Hall of Fame outfielder for the Detroit Tigers.
(See DAREDEVIL, MARSHALL, TEMPERAMENTALLY.)
Alone means “by oneself.” Take away the first letter, and you get lone, which means “by oneself.” Now take away the first letter of lone, and you get one, which means “by itself.”
(See PASTERN, REACTIVATION, STARTLING.)
Amateur is derived from the very first verb that all students of Latin learn—amo: “I love.” Amateurs do it for the love of it. Whether it be golf, fishing, quilting, or model trains, it can only be out of love that the amateur pours so many hours into an unremunerative pursuit.
(See VACCUUM.)
Ambidextrous, from Latin roots meaning “using both the left and right hands with equal ease,” is a twelve-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 twelve-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.
The opposite of ambidextrous is ambisinister: “clumsy, as if possessing two left hands.”
(See FACETIOUS, METALIOUS, RIGHT, ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT, UNNOTICEABLY.)
Anagram. Can you create one word out of the letters in new door?
The answer is (yuck yuck) one word. The letters in new door are the same as those in one word, except in a different order.
When is enough not enough?
When you rearrange the letters in enough, you get one hug. Everybody knows that one hug is never enough!
To what commonality do the following words point: thorn, shout, seat/sate/teas, and stew/wets? The solution is that each is an anagram of a compass point: north, south, east, and west.
These riddles involve anagrams. An anagram (from Greek ana gráphein 
, “to write over again”) is a rearrangement of all the letters in a familiar word, phrase, or name to form another word, phrase, or name, as in the italicized words in this anagrammatical poem:
Arty Idol
Watch anagrams and you will see
That they inspire idolatry.
Please do not come o tardily,
And dilatory please don’t be.
Adroitly anagrams will start
To alter daily rot. They’re smart:
A dirty lot, an oily dart,
They’ll change into the doily art.
Anagrams work best when there exists an appropriate, that is, A-1, apt, proper relationship between the two anagrams. If that connection is semantically powerful, we call the two items aptagrams:
aye = yea
desperation = a rope ends it
detour = routed
dormitory = dirty room
dynamite = may end it
evil = vile
insurgent = unresting
megalomania = a main goal: me
prosecutors = court posers
rescues = secures
ridiculous = I? ludicrous!
a shoplifter = has to pilfer
statement = testament
upholsterers = restore plush
No wonder that those who believe in the magical potency of words have hailed the anagram as ah, an art gem and anagrams as ars magna (“the great art”).
(See COMPASS, DANIEL, EPISCOPAL, ESTONIA, SET, SILENT, SPARE, STAR, STOP, TIME, WASHINGTON, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.)
Anger, please remember, is only a single letter away from danger. That’s why angered and enraged are anagrams of each other.
Anger kicks off the most pyrotechnic reverse bilingual palindrome ever concocted. Back in March 1886, there appeared in Our Young Folks magazine a magical, mesmerizing, miraculous Latin-English pairing, created by James C. P., that reads forward in English and backward in Latin. The two statements make sense in both directions and retain the same meaning in each language:
Anger? ’Tis safe. Never bar it. Use love! Evoles ut ira breve neaps sit; regna!
Danger is one of the most anagrammable words in the English language, as witness this little verse:
Ranged in the Garden of Danger,
A serpent at present repents.
Enter asp, in slithers a serpent.
Take a gander. Stay outside the fence.
Anthology. I am button-burstingly proud of a book of mine titled Word Wizard because it is an anthology of my best and most popular work and thus represents the arc of my writing career. The Greek forebear is anthologia: ánthos 
, “flower” + légein 
, “gather” = “a gathering or collection of flowers.” I am so pleased to have grown enough literary blossoms that I could arrange them into a bouquet.
Our English language is made more exquisite and colorful by an anthology of flowery words:
. Over time the word acquired an initial d and eventually became daffodil. That’s fortunate because we now have the best of all flower palindromes: lid off a daffodil.
. More than two thousand years ago, Pliny the Elder observed, “Mirabilis est órkhis herba, sive serapias, gemina radice, testiculis simili.” Even if you don’t know Latin, I’m confident that you can deduce the meaning of the first and last parts of that statement. Pliny believed that just holding an orchid in one’s hand would expand sexual desire.(See DANDELION, PHILODENDRON.)
Archetypical is the longest word with the most letters in alphabetical place. In archetypical, the letters a, c, e, i, and l occur as the first, third, fifth, ninth, and twelfth letters, just as they do in their foreordained alphabetic slots.
Arf. Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, and Snoopy bark Arf!, Bow-wow!, and Woof! but they do that only if they are English-barking dogs. The rest of the world, it appears, doesn’t hear ear-to-ear with us:
| • Brazilian | au-au! |
| • Chinese | wang-wang! |
| • French | gnaf-gnaf! |
| • German | wau-wau! |
| • Hebrew | hav-hav! |
| • Japanese | wan-wan! |
| • Russian | gav-gav! |
| • Swahili | hu-hu-hu-huuu! |
| • Swedish | voff-voff! |
And fifty million Italians are convinced their dogs bark like Bing Crosby—Boo-boo!
Arm is one of more-than-you-might-guess body parts spelled with just three letters. Lend your ear to and cast your eye on ear, eye, gum, hip, jaw, leg, lip, rib, toe, and (more marginally) fat, gut, lid, and a plural, ova. Then there’s lap, which disappears every time you stand up.
(See ELBOW, EYE.)
Ashtray. What do some folks empty into their trash? Their ashtray, which turns out to be pig latin for trash.
Other pig latin favorites of mine:
beast/East Bay
devil/evil day
lover/overlay
true/outré
Asinine. The meaning “stupid, silly” flows from an earlier meaning, “like an ass, donkey, or mule.” You know that something catlike is feline and something doglike canine. Here are a dozen more animal adjectives to up the level of your semantic sophistication:
ape – simian
bear – ursine
bee – apian
bird – avian
bull – taurine
cow – bovine
deer – corvine
eagle – aquiline
fish – piscine
fox – vulpine
horse – equine
lamb – ovine
lion - leonine
pig - porcine
sheep - ovine
wolf - lupine
(See CONGRESS.)
Assassin descends from the Arabic hashshashin, literally “hashish eaters.” The original hashshashin were members of a religious and military order located in the mountains of Lebanon. These fanatics would commit political murder after being intoxicated with great quantities of hashish.
Atone. The literal meaning of atone issues from what the word actually looks like—to be “at one,” that is, united with God.
(See DAREDEVIL.)
@. Used for centuries in the sense of “each at the price of,” the now-ubiquitous @, or at-sign, has recently taken on the locative sense of “at,” especially in e-mail addresses. The @ predates the dawn of e-mail, by almost five hundred years, on Florentine trade documents dating back as far as 1536.
Informally and playfully, @ has taken on various names in other languages:
| • Chinese | little mouse |
| • Danish | a trunk |
| • Dutch | little monkey tail |
| • Finnish | meow meow |
| • German | cinnamon cake |
| • Greek | little duck |
| • Hebrew | elephant’s ear, strudel |
| • Hungarian | worm |
| • Korean | sea snail |
| • Russian | dog |
Awful is one of a host of words whose noble meanings have degraded over time. In the year 1666 a great fire swept through London and destroyed more than half the city, including three-quarters of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Sir Christopher Wren, the original designer of the cathedral and perhaps the finest architect of all time, was commissioned to rebuild the great edifice. He began in 1675 and finished in 1710—a remarkably short time for such a task. When the magnificent edifice was completed, Queen Anne, the reigning monarch, visited the cathedral and told Wren that his work was “awful, artificial, and amusing.” Sir Christopher, so the story goes, was delighted with the royal compliment, because in those days awful meant “full of awe, awe-inspiring,” artificial meant “artistic,” and amusing, from the Muses, meant “amazing.”
(See REEK.)
Aye can be anagrammatically looped into its own synonym, yea. These two English words share no letters with their French cousin oui, yet together they encompass the six most common vowels.
(See MANATEE.)