Are You Letterate?
A litter of literal literature from the lateral littoral

Some words have a curious derivation involving the name of a letter. The relationship usually involves an analogy based on the shape of the letter, but other relationships come from the size of the letter, or the sound represented by it. And then there are words for some odd letters, symbols and punctuation marks.

• 66 and 99 were the names given by a friend of mine in fourth grade to the opening and closing double quote marks. I didn't know what he was talking about. I just thought he was funny because he wore sandals. Now I find that lots of people talk this way.
• An A battery ?
• An A frame is a type of house, more commonly a chalet, with no walls, two slanting roof sides, and two floors, often with large picture windows, suggesting the letter A.
• An A level is not those dreaded English examinations; rather it's an ancient Egyptian level shaped like the letter A. The crossbar has a line marking its center. A string is attached to the top of the A, and a weight keeps it taut. When the string hangs down right by the crossbar marking, the crossbar is level.
• An A shirt is a "T shirt" with no arms at all.
• A to Z suggests full and complete coverage of a subject.
• An A-hed is the nickname for any of the offbeat articles that appear in the central column of the front page of the Wall Street Journal, introduced with a multiline headline whose lines are arranged to suggest the letter A.
• Ache is a former spelling of "H", which nobody uses now because if would be pronounced "Aik".
• Air Quotes are the gestured quote signs used to indicate skepticism about a word or phrase; an acting out of the "Quote Unquote" phrase.
• Aitch is the most interesting name of a letter in the English alphabet. The spelling of all the others I was able to figure out or fake (except, I guess, for the name of Q.) But I couldn't even begin to imagine how to spell the name of H which also breaks the rule of consonant names by not beginning with its own sound.
• Aitchless sneeringly denotes those people who characteristically drop the initial "H" sound of words.
• Albam describes a cypher using the Hebrew alphabet, in which the first letter of the first half, Aleph, is interchanged with the first letter of the second half, Lamedh, and similarly Beth is interchanged with Mem and so on.
• Alpha and Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, is a phrase meaning the first and last; the beginning and the end, and by implication, everything in between. These letters occasionally appear in religious imagery to suggest that God is the beginning and end and everything in between.
• Alphabet comes from the names of two letters that aren't in the alphabet - not ours, anyway. By the way, analphabetic is a synonym for "illiterate".
• Ampersand is an "honorary" letter. It used to be the 27-th letter in the alphabet, so it trailed the alphabet song with "X, Y, Z, and, per se, 'and'", and this got slurred to ampersand. The shape of an ampersand was originally a script form of Et, the Latin for "and".
• Ampussy-and is a variant form of "ampersand".
• The Apostrophe is a formal name for the punctuation mark that is sometimes called the "single quote" (at least when the symbol is a short vertical mark, or looking like a very small reflected "c"). The name comes from a rhetorical term apo-strophe that describes the insertion, in a speech to a general audience, of comments to an individual or small subgroup.
• Asterisk is the star-shaped mark *; aster is a Greek root meaning "star".
• Asterism is a pattern of up and down stars, something like:

              *   *   *
                *   *
            

• The at sign was originally simply a grocer's symbol for the unit price: "5 Apples @ 2 cents each", for instance. It was considered of such little importance that, for instance, there was no Morse Code symbol for it. (This was only recently changed, because of the popularity of Internet addresses, and the official symbol is now "DIT-DAH-DAH-DIT-DAH-DIT" although most senders prefer to simply spell out "AT". The odd shape of the symbol has inspired a few interesting names, including "monkey's tail" in Dutch and "petit escargot (little snail)" in French.
• Athbash or atbash is yet another mystical Hebrew cypher, in which Aleph is interchanged with Taw, the last letter of the second half, Beth with Shin, and so on. In the book of Jeremiah 25:26 and 51:41, the name Babel (Beth-Beth-Lamed) becomes Sheshach (Shin-Shin-Kaph).
• Backslash is a name for the symbol \.
• Bang is a computer user's name for the exclamation mark.
• Barbecue, the name for an outdoor cookout, is supposedly derived from the brand of a cattle ranch, the "Bar-B-Q".
• Bee is a way of spelling the name of the letter "B".
• Betacism refers to the loss of the distinction between the sounds of B and V in a language. This is a berry berry bad thing to happen! It can also occur in a person's speech who habitually converts V or P sounds to B.
• Blind P is the editorial symbol for "paragraph", ¶ or a backwards P whose "eye" is filled in.
• Breve is the curved mark placed over short vowels.
• Bullet is the name for the little filled-in circle used to mark each item on a list.
• Bunny ears is meant to suggest quotation marks.
• An C beam is a steel beam whose profile is in the shape of the capital letter C.
• A C clamp is a clamp in the shape of the letter C.
• A C clef is a musical symbol used to indicate the pitch of the notes. The symbol is a stylized letter C, and the note middle C corresponds to the line that passes through the middle of the symbol. (Clef is the French word for "key").
• C-fold towels are paper towels made by folding two opposite sides to meet in the middle, forming a sort of flat C.
• A C hole is the C shaped sound hole in viols and guitars.
• A C note is a hundred dollar bill, named for the Roman numeral C, denoting "100" and abbreviating the Roman word centum meaning "100".
• A C post is a C shaped pillar on the side of a car, which connects the floor and the roof.
• C ring is a ring that has been cut at one point, or a ring with a sizable gap. In most cases, the cut has been made to allow the ring to encircle an object; the ring can also be used to connect several bands or loops.
• A C scroll is a kind of ornamental C-shaped scroll design on furniture.
• C spring is a spring in the shape of the letter C. Such a spring is used in the design of seismometers, for instance.
• A C stick is a flexible C-shaped rod, with a tennis ball attached to one end and a platform on the other end, used in filming movies where an actor needs to pretend to be speaking to another actor whose image is to be added in post-production.
• A C wrench is the common C-shaped non-adjustable wrench.
• A C'd frame is a custom car adaptation which lowers the car by cutting the chassis and inserting C-shaped sections above the rear axle.
• A Caesura is an indicator of a break in the flow of sound in a Classical Greek or Latin poem, and is represented by two vertical bars, ||, also known as parallels.
• A caron is a diacritical mark, sometimes called the inverted circumflex, which frequently occurs in Czech spelling.
• A Cedilla is the strangely modified c that looks like it has a beard. The little dangly thing is actually a z. It sometimes occurs in older English publications when a foreign word like façade is printed. The cedilla occurs in French (cedille), Italian (zediglia), and Spanish (cedilla), and is intended to modify the "default" c sound. The name actually refers to the Greek letter zeta.
• Cee is a way of spelling the name of the letter "C".
• Chiasm - information from the left and right eyes goes back to the visual cortex along thick optic nerves. About halfway along this path, the nerves meet, and seem to cross. Actually, some of the nerve bundles on the left go left, and some right; the eyes are actually exchanging some information. This crossing area is called the optic chiasm, and oddly enough, the word derives from the X-shape of the Greek letter Chi.
• Chiasm or chiasmus was originally used for a sort of inversion in literature, such as "He left Egypt; Egypt was left by her", and derives from the X-shape of the Greek letter Chi.
• Chi Rho is a symbolic abbreviation of the name of Christ, being an elaborate depiction of the Greek letters Chi and Rho. It is also sometimes called the Chrismon.
• A circumflex is a bent bar, usually appearing above a letter, like so: ê.
• The Collar of Esses was a chain of S shaped links worn by high officials of the House of Lancaster. You may have spotted that fashion plate Thomas More wearing such a chain in A Man for All Seasons.
• A Colon was originally a rhetorical term, indicated a phrase of short length.
• A Comma was originally a rhetorical term, indicating a phrase of intermediate length.
• The comma butterfly has a mark on each wing shaped like a comma or the letter "C". (In German, its name is the "C-falter".)
• Crisscross, which has come to mean any pattern of crossing objects, came from the common printing figure of a cross, or "Christ's cross", used, for instance, as the initial sign in any presentation of the alphabet.
• Crisscross row is a nickname for the alphabet, apparently because, in primers and hornbooks, the alphabet was preceded by a large cross ("Christ's cross").
• Crossrow, a printed list of the alphabet, so named because it typically appeared as a single row of letters, and began with an initial cross.
• Crossing the T, a nautical procedure in which an attacking ship passes along the stern of another ship, so that it can fire each of its guns at the stern of the target, which usually has little or no armament there.
• Crunch is another name for the pound sign or hash mark.
• Cue might be how you spell Q, but then again, since there's no official name, I've seen it spelled Kew, Kue, Ku, Kyoo, Kyu and even Queue.
• Cue, meaning an actor's signal to begin, is traced back to the Latin word Quando, meaning "when", abbreviated Q, and pronounced cue. Playscripts were written with the letter Q before each player's lines.
• A Curly Cue is a "swash" letter Q, or the tail of such a Q, and hence we have curlicue.
• Curly Pi is a variant Greek letter, written as a lowercase omega with an overbar, used in mathematics and physics. In the TeX text processing language, it is encoded as "\varpi".
• A D duct is a hot air duct, with a D-shaped cross-section, in the leading edge of an airfoil, used for deicing.
• A D lock is a bicycle lock shaped like a D.
• A D net is a net with an orifice shaped like a D, used for collecting plankton from the bottom of the ocean bed.
• A D Ring is a metal ring in the shape of the letter D; the flat side commonly allows a strap to pass through.
• A D Valve is a metal valve in the shape of the letter D, used in steam engines;
• A Dagger is the name for a printing symbol that looks like a dagger, and is used for unnumbered footnotes. There is also a double dagger, necessary when the footnotes are really piled on. I ran across both of these in a story by Edgar Allan Poe in which he used a riot of footnotes. Try to find it!
• A dash is one name for a horizontal line, appearing at about the middle height of text, and having various widths.
• Decussate (which appears in Samuel Johnson's famous impenetrable definition of a network!) refers to something having the shape of a X, but it arrives at this meaning by way of Latin, since decussis means "ten", and the Romans used an X to symbolize that number.
• Dee is a way of spelling the name of the letter "D".
• A dee is a D-shaped leather loop on a saddle, for securing small items.
• De-essing:

  Changing an 's' to an 'sh' was an affectation you heard on some American records, so it helped make the Beatles sound more like their musical idols, plus it removed any kind of potential de-essing problems, where, if there was too much top end (treble), the sound on vinyl would distort.

  Geoff Emerick, 'Here, There, and Everywhere'.
• Delta is the Greek letter shaped like a triangle suggested the fan shape of the alluvial deposits at a river's mouth.
• A delta connection is a triangular symbol used in a three-phase circuit.
• A delta metal is an alloy of zinc, copper and iron; its name comes from the fact that the symbol for delta has three sides.
• A Delta wing is a kind of airplane architecture in which the wings are swept back to form a large triangle.
• Deltaic means shaped like the letter Delta.
• The Deltidium is the Delta-shaped space between the beak and the hinge of a brachyopod shell.
• Deltoid means shaped like the letter Delta. In anatomy, the deltoid muscle lies over the joint of the shoulder and raises the arm away from the side of the body.
• A diagonal is a forward slash sign, /.
• A Dieresis is a pair of dots, similar to an umlaut, but meant to indicate that a second vowel is to be prounounced separately. A dieresis was occasionally seen over the second "o" in "cooperate", as in "coöperate", in the fussy old Reader's Digest, and they continue to pop up in the willfully antique New Yorker. Other words that once used the dieresis include naïve and Boëthius.
• Digamma is an obsolete Greek letter, resembling a capital F, supposed to represent the W sound, and used in the alphanumeric coding system to stand for 6. Another name for this letter was vau.
• A Dingbat is any kind of ornamental or fancy letter or symbol.
• Dining at the Y is a slang term for cunnilingus, from a resemblance between the female genitals and the letter Y.
• A diple is a name for the character "greater than", or "closing angle bracket", >. It was used by the Greeks to indicate a rejected passage in a text, or to otherwise call attention.
• A ditto mark is a (double) quotation mark, but the variety in which the marks point straight downwards (unlike the curved "66" and "99" versions). The name comes from the Latin "dicta" suggesting "as said above", and I have seen it abbreviated as "do." in, I believe, some odd short story by Poe. Of course, once it was used to mean "the same as above" it was a natural extension to begin talking about "ditto machines" to reproduce a stencil, or "ditto heads" who agree with whatever Rush Limbaugh says. (Has he shut up yet?)
• Dog's ballocks is a slang term for the punctuation :-.
• Dog's cock is a slang term for the exclamation mark !.
• Dot is a name for the period symbol.
• Dot dot dot, an oral way to suggest the ellipsis, ..., suggesting "and so on" or "more things like that".
• To dot the i's and cross the t's is to carefully attend to all the minor details in a procedure.
• Dotless i is the name of the lowercase letter i, when printed without the dot. This is occasionally useful when an overbar or accent is to be used to modify the letter.
• Dotless j is the name of the lowercase letter j, when printed without the dot. This is occasionally useful when an overbar or accent is to be used to modify the letter.
• A double O or a double O look is a wide-eyed stare of astonishment.
• Double U is the name for W which is, of course, Double V, at least in looks.
• Dubya is slang for W. It is often humorously used, as when referring to the second world war as "Dubya dubya two".
• Dubya is commonly used to signify President George W Bush, partly to distinguish him from his father, President George H W Bush.
• Ecphonesis means "outcry" and is a fancy name for the exclamation mark.
• Eff is a way of spelling the name of the letter "F".
• Effing is a euphemism for whatever unseemly obscenity might begin with F.
• An Elephant's Trunk is the "at-sign", literally "@".
• Ell is a way of spelling the name of the letter "L".
• An Ell is a building or wing of a building shaped like the letter L.
• An Ellipsis is a set of three dots ... that suggest an unfinished thought or saying.
• Em is a way of spelling the name of the letter "M".
• Em denotes a horizontal measures of printing space equivalent to that required by the letter M.
• An Em-dash amounts to a double hyphen, and is used to indicate a pause or change of thought.
• En is a way of spelling the name of the letter "N".
• En denotes a horizontal measures of printing space equivalent to that required by N.
• An En-dash is a short dash used to connect a hyphenated word.
• End Slug is the name of the filled-in box used to denote the end of an article in a newspaper or magazine.
• An epiphoneme is a fancy name for the exclamation mark.
• The Episemon were the "after signs", that is, the 3 obsolete Greek letters Vau or Digamma, Koppa/Qoppa and Sampi, which were sometimes listed at the end of the alphabet, and primarily used in the Greek's alphanumeric coding.
• Epsilon is a Greek letter whose name has a meaning. The psilon part of the name means "bare" or "mere"; this letter represents a short or unstressed "E" sound. The long "E" sound is Eta.
• Eroteme is a name for the question mark.
• Erte was the pseudonym of the Art Deco artist illustrator and costume designer Remain di Tirtoff, and comes from the French pronounciation of his initials, "R T" (air-tay).
• Ess is a way of spelling the name of the letter S.
• Etacism, from the name of the Greek vowel sound eta, refers to the pronunciation of the Greek eta as a long "a" sound; Erasmus was one of the promoters of this style, as opposed to itacism!.
• Eth or Edh is an old English letter which looks like a crossed D, and represents a "th" sound.
• An exclamation mark is the common name for the punctuation mark for surprise or emphasis, !. One derivation for its form suggests that it was originally a stylized form of the letters Io, an abbreviation of the Latin interjectio.
• Ezod is an obsolete name for the letter Z.
• An F clef is a musical symbol used to indicate the pitch of the notes. The symbol is so stylized that it looks nothing like the letter F. The note F below middle C corresponds to the line that passes between the double dots of the symbol.
• An F clamp is a clamp in the shape of the letter F, with two horizontal bars connected on one side by a vertical bar. The lower horizontal bar can be raised or lowered by turning a screw.
• ff is the representation of a letter used as the first letter in some Scottish names. It is pronounced "F", and often transcribed as "F", so its usefulness may be questioned. Roger Moore starred in a movie called "ffolkes", and the aunt of the narrator of "The Towers of Trebizond" is Dorothy ffoulkes-Corbett, so you may still encounter it.
• F head - having one valve in the head, and another on the side of the engine cylinder.
• F holes are the long graceful curly openings on the faces of violins and certain other stringed instruments, shaped like a baroque f.
• A figure 4 is a way of sitting with the legs apart, and the right foot resting on the left knee. The legs then form a sort of figure of the numeral 4. Supposedly, sitting this way was, at least at one time, indicative of being American.
• A fistnote is the name for the little pointing hand icon ("Honest Lawyer, One Flight Up").
• A fleuron is a flower- or leaf-shaped symbol.
• A Flubdub, also called a dingbat, is any kind of ornamental or fancy letter or symbol.
• A fluctustress is a sort of wavy underlining intended to suggest the underlining was done by hand.
• A full stop is a name for the punctuation mark that is also known as the period.
• Futhark is the name of the runic alphabet, you know, those vertical bars with little diagonal shoots here and there that you find so often carved into rocks in Minnesota. This alphabet gets its name from its first six letters: "f", "u", "th", "a", "r" and "c". Why can't they name their alphabet more sensibly, like ours?
• A G clef is a musical symbol used to indicate the pitch of the notes. The symbol is a stylized letter G (you can't see it til you know what you're looking for!), and the note G above middle C corresponds to the line that is circled by the curly tail of the symbol.
• A G crimp or G clamp is the name in England of what in America is called a C clamp, and in fact, gives perhaps a better picture of the actual device!
• Gamma is a sort of surgical instrument made up of a handle, and a very sharp blade, in the shape of the Greek letter Gamma.
• A Gamma moth is a kind of moth which has markings similar to Gamma on its wings.
• Gammacism is difficulty in pronouncing velar or guttural consonants such as G and K.
• A Gammadion or Gamma cross is the swastika, which can be constructed by using four Gamma's.
• Gamut comes from the Guidonian musical scale, in which Gamma denoted the lowest note, and ut the lowest note of each hexachord.
• Gee is a common spelling for the letter "G".
• Gee Throw is a heavy wooden lever with a curved point used to break out logging sleds.
• Guillemots is the name of the double angle bracket signs used in European texts the way we use quotation marks. It is also the name of a sea-bird, and the shape of a flying bird might have suggested the name.
• An H beam or H bar is a metal beam with the cross-section of an H. It is distinguished from an I beam by having noticeably wider flanges.
• H block is the name of the individual buildings in Maze Prison, each shaped like an H.
• H budding is plate budding in which cuts in the bark of the stock are made in the form of an H.
• An H hinge is a hinge with leaves which, when open, resemble the letter H.
• An H stretcher is a bar supporting two other bars and forming an H; often seen in chair legs.
• Hacek is a diacritical mark used in some Czech words. It's like a small, shallow V.
• Haitch is an alternate spelling-out of the name for H, which is more often seen as "aitch".
• Hash or hash mark is a name for the symbol #, now made famous by what Twitter calls "hash tags".
• Herge was the pseudonym of Georges Remi, the author of the Tintin books, and spells out the French pronunciation of "RG", a reversal of his initials.
• Hockey Stick is a name for the letter L, based on a similarity of shape. The humorous spelling of "hell" is "H-E-Double Hockey Sticks".
• Hyoid literally means something shaped like the Greek letter Upsilon. Apparently, the etymology is hu-oeides, where hu is the name of the letter. Recall that Upsilon is to be read as U-psilon, that is, U-short, and it's not so surprising that hy- is related to hu- is related to u. The hyoid bone is a U shaped bone at the root of the tongue. If you watch a lot of crime shows, you know that this bone is damaged when the victim is strangled. It's also one of the rare bones that's not attached to another bone.
• A hyphen is a kind of dash. The name comes from the Greek, and indicates that the hyphen was originally written below two letters, to bring them together.
• Hypsilon, a variant spelling of the name of the Greek letter Upsilon.
• Hypsiloid literally means something shaped like the Greek letter Upsilon.
• An I bar is a steel beam whose profile is in the shape of the capital letter I.
• An I beam is a steel beam whose profile is in the shape of the capital letter I.
• An I formation is an offensive football play in which the quarterback, a half back, the full back, and the tail back line up behind the center.
• An I girder is a steel beam whose profile is in the shape of the capital letter I.
• I hat, the letter "I" with a circumflex above it.
• I head - having valves in the cylinder head.
• An I iron is a steel beam whose profile is in the shape of the capital letter I.
• An I ring is a band or metal hoop that goes around a metal drum.
• An I seawall is a thin concrete wall used to protect against flooding; it is distinguished by having no significant horizontal concrete supporting base.
• Interrobang was a word coined in the '60's for a punctuation mark that combined the question and exclamation marks into one symbol, to be used in phrases like "You're running off with my wife?!".
• Inverted commas is a term for quotation marks.
• Iota means a very small amount, and comes from the fact that the Greek letter iota is relatively small.
• Iotacism or Itacism is the pronunciation of the Greek eta as a long e sound.
• Izzard is an obsolete name for Z, compared to which Zed looks positively normal. However, I've seen an explanation now which derives the name from "S hard", and after "and, per se, and" for "ampersand" and "big O/little O" for "omega/omicron", I'll believe many things!
• J is a "fancy" form of I; Roman inscriptions, and "real" Latin, use an I where we have a J. The original I had both a vowel and consonantal function, with the J later being used as a specialized consonantal I. Occasionally, you might see a J used in Roman numerals, especially lower case ones.
• A J bar lift is a ski-lift which comprises a sequence of J-shaped bars.
• J bolt is a bolt in the shape of a J.
• J box is a J-shaped box through which fabric is passed for a process such as bleaching.
• The J curve is a curve, suggestive of the shape of a J, that illustrates how after a currency falls in value, the trade deficit grows first before shrinking. It can also look like a reversed J, similar to a hyperbola, and is referred to in biology as representing a typical distribution of species in an area, with a few numerous species, and many species with just a few representatives.
• J pouch, a bag or pouch surgically formed from part of the small intestine to facilitate the temporary retention of stools.
• A J rig is a duck decoy in the shape of the letter J.
• J stick, another name for a J-bar lift.
• A J stroke is a rowing stroke, in the course of which the end of the paddle or oar traverses the figure of a J.
• A J turn is a test of a car's reliability, made by making a sudden sharp turn around an obstacle like another car or an animal, resulting in a path that looks something like a J.
• A jot is a very small thing, used in the phrase "down to the last jot and tittle", and derived from the letter iota, itself an indication of small things. A tittle, by the way, is a very small diacritical mark or accent.
• A K frame bridge is one in which weight is placed on a single support, with no backup. The structure looks like a sequence of capital K's, lying on their backs.
• A K shaped economic recovery is one in which, like the arms of the letter K, the rich are improving while the poor continue to deteriorate.
• A K turn is often called a "three point turn"; it is a method of turning around in a road too narrow to permit a U turn.
• A K truss is a building truss with a vertical member and two obliques, which forms a K.
• King's X is a "safe" sign used in children's games. Forming an X with your fingers means that you can't be caught. The phrase is supposed to have come from "King's excuse".
• Koppa or Qoppa is an obsolete Greek letter, retained in the alphanumeric coding system to represent 90.
• L 7 represents a square, and hence an unhip person, from the shape formed by the two symbols put together, and suggested manually by the outstretched thumbs and forefingers of both hands.
• An L bar or L beam is a steel beam in the shape of an L.
• An L block is an L-shaped concrete building block.
• An L hinge is a hinge in the shape of a capital L.
• L head is a name for an internal combustion engine with valves placed beside the piston, rather than inside the cylinder head; also called a "flathead" engine.
• An L pipe is a piece of plumbing pipe with a 90 degree bend, making it look like an L.
• An L shaped bottom is what happens when the stock market drops sharply...and doesn't come back up for so long that then it's time to start a new letter.
• An L sill is a carpenter's term for a sill used in a building frame. A plate is attached to a basement wall, and an upright header is fixed to the outer edge of the plate, forming an L.
• An L square is a carpenter's ruler shaped like an L.
• An L wrench is a wrench shaped like an L.
• Lallation is the imperfect pronunciation of "L" as "R".
• The lambda suture or lambdoidal suture is a suture between the occipital bone and the two parietal bones of the skull.
• A Lambda virus is shaped like the Greek letter Lambda, (l), and is studied by a lambdologist.
• Lambdacism is excessive use of the L sound, or defective pronunciation of it. Perhaps this happens when I torture my little brother Hyung-Chun Lee by making him say the shibboleth "I'm really Larry the Raleigh lorry roller" until we both crack up.
• Lambdoid or Lambdoidal means shaped like the letter Lambda.
• A lazy eight is a name for the symbol ¥ used to denote infinity.
• A lemniscus is a name for the symbol ¸ we sometimes use for the division sign, which could be formed on a typewriter by overstriking a dash with a colon.
• A ligature, literally a "binding", is like that band of skin that joined the Chang and Eng, the Siamese twins. In typesetting, a ligature is a reformation of separate characters into a new form that is easier to read, or abbreviated, or traditional. People are often unaware that certain letter combinations are routinely replaced by ligatured forms, particularly pairs beginning with f, such as "ff", "fl", "fi". Historically, the letter W came about as a ligature of two V's, used to represent a sound for which there was no standard letter. Two other ligatures were commonly used in words derived from Latin such as Cæsar or fœtal. These ligatures were also used for words in the Old English alphabet, and in fact, Æ was known as "ash" and Œ as "ethel"!. Ethel should not be confused with Ø, which is known as "slashed O" or "O with a stroke". This is a letter in its own right in some Scandinavian languages. At one time the letter "s" could be written with a special symbol that looked like a bar-less "f". In German, a special ligature was developed for the double-s character, since the second "s" would appear in the more common form. The ligature replaced the form "fs" by ß, a form which known as the "esszet" or "S-Z". Another ligature came by replacing the Latin "et", meaning "and", by a stylized ligatured pair of letters "e" and "t", which in turn became the Ampersand. I have seen the phrase "et cetera" written as "&c".
• A long S is that "old timey" version of the letter S that looked like a lower case f without the cross-bar. It is still used in German, so that the word daß is properly transliterated as dass.
• An M line is a pattern formed by the hairline of a mature male in the early stages of male pattern baldness.
• An M roof is a roof with a double peak.
• A macron is the horizontal bar used to mark long vowels.
• A Maltese cross is the symbol of a cross with flared ends, occasionally used to mark a person's death date, or as a punctuation mark.
• A manicule is the image of a little hand (which is what the word means exactly, in Latin), used to point to a specific word, phrase or line in a text.
• Mytacism is the incorrect or excessive use of the letter M.
• The O sign is made by a recently dead patient's open mouth.
• Obelisk is another name for the dagger mark.
• An obelus is a sort of dash mark, or division sign (a dash with a dot above and below), used to mark passages in a text that are doubtful or corrupt. The word derives from a Greek word for "spit" or "pointed pillar", which also gives us obelisk.
• Oboe is a radar navigation system in which a plane flies in circles while two ground stations measure the distance to a beacon on the plane. Oboe is a radio key word for O, which in turn refers to the shape of the path of the plane.
• Octothorp or Octothorpe is a recently coined term for the # sign, more often called "pound", "hash", "mesh" or "crosshatch". By the way, octo means "eight", but aren't there nine little boxes made by the shape rather than eight? Well, apparently, this is counting the number of "points" or line endings in the figure. See the Octothorpe Story.
• An O-ring is a rubber ring used to seal joints and is, you might think, a perfect example of reduplication.
• Omega is the name of a letter of the Greek alphabet, whose name means "big O".
• An omega block is a twist in the jet stream that partially encircles a high pressure weather system, stalling a dome of warm and dry air over a particular region.
• An omega-head is a person who cannot be made to understand. Any explanation aimed at the person whizzes across the shoulder, races around the head without going into it, and the proceeds in the original direction, having traced out the shape of Omega.
• Omegoidal refers to things (if any?) in the shape of omega.
• Omicron is the name of a letter of the Greek alphabet, but its name actually means "little O".
• P Celtic refers to those Celtic languages in which the IndoEuropean "Qu" sound has become "P".
• A P trap is a plumbing fixture, a section of pipe with a "wedding ring trap" that fits directly beneath a drain. Doesn't quite make a P to me.
• Parallels is a name for the double vertical bar ||.
• Pee is a way of spelling the letter "P", and is also a euphemistic description of "to urinate", deriving from the fact that it is the initial letter of the noneuphemistic "piss".
• Pentalpha is another name for a pentagram or five pointed star, and derives from the fact that such a star looks like 5 capital alpha's.
• A period was originally a a rhetorical term for a complete phrase, only later coming to mean the marker that indicated the end of a period. Thus, one could say that a period comes at the end of a period.
• A pilcrow is a name for the "paragraph" symbol ¶, or reversed P. The etymology of this word is obscure, which is as close as you can get an etymologist to say "I don't know" without actually applying torture.
• Pipe is the UNIX user's name for the symbol |, which is used to connect the output channel of one program to the input channel of another.
• Pling is a name for the exclamation mark !.
• Point is a name for the period symbol.
• Pomega is a variant Greek letter, written as a lowercase omega with an overbar, and also known in mathematics and physics as "Curly Pi", while in TeX it is encoded as "\varpi".
• Pound Sign is a name for the symbol #, which is also called the number sign, hash mark, or hatch mark.
• Pretzel is a nickname for the ampersand &, inspired by its twisted shape.
• Pythagorean Y refers to the Greek capital letter Upsilon, whose shape is similar to our capital Y. Pythagoras used its shape to point a moral, that all men reach a point where they must make a decision, one way leading to righteousness and the other to evil.
• Q Celtic refers to those Celtic languages in which the IndoEuropean "Qu" sound has become "Q".
• The Q sign is made by a very dead patient's open mouth, and protruding tongue.
• The question mark is the sign ?, used to indicate a question. It is supposed to have been a stylized form of the letters Qo, an abbreviation of the Latin Quaestio. In Spanish, you will find an inverted question mark begins a sentence as well, better to allow the reader to apply the distinctive questioning intonation immediately.
• The question mark butterfly (polygonia interrogationis), has a marking on each wing that suggests a question mark.
• Quote Unquote is a suggestion that the following spoken word or phrase would, in writing, be surrounded by quotation marks to indicate the speaker's skepticism.
• R Color is the addition of an R sound to a vowel.
• R-less is a technical term for linquistics, and describes, for instance, the pronounciation of words commonly used in New England; the opposing term is R-full;
• A Reverse Square Root economic recovery is a variation on the V-shaped recovery in which the economy recovers to a significantly lower plateau valley that it had before the downturn. A graph of this transition suggests a square root sign written backwards;
• Rhotacism is a defective pronunciation or use of the R sound, or the dropping of that sound at the end of words as when you "pahk youh cah in Hahvahd yahd".
• An S bend is a plumbing pipe in the shape of an S, often evident in the design of toilets.
• An S brake is a brake in the shape of an S, used to slow down a pair of wheels;
• An S bridge is, my friends in Wheeling swear, a kind of bridge necessary at certain difficult points of geography, and they say they have one there;
• An S curve is any sort of double curve, especially on a winding road. Sometimes such curves are called ess curves, or we say the road essed.
• An S hook is a piece of metal bent into the shape of an S;
• An S trap is a plumbing pipe in the shape of an S.
• An S twist is the twist in yarn induced by a counterclockwise-spinning spindle, sometimes called a crossband twist.
• An S wrench is a wrench that is slightly twisted, suggesting the shape of a gentle S.
• The Samian letter is named for Pythagoras, the philosopher of Samos, who took the letter Y (really, the Greek form, which was Upsilon, which looks like a Y that hasn't been watered in a while), as a symbol of how, once one deviates ever so slightly from the path of virtue, one wanders increasingly far away - an apparently, virtue starts avoiding you too!
• San is an obsolete Greek letter, about which so little is known that it is not sure whether it differs from the also obsolete Sampi.
• Sampi is an obsolete Greek letter, which was kept around for use in the 27 symbol alphanumeric code, where it had the value 900.
• A Sawbuck is a ten dollar bill, because 10 is X in Roman numerals, and X looks like the legs of a saw horse, which at one time, when people actually sawed things, was called a saw buck. Similary, a $20 bill is called a double sawbuck.
• Scare quotes refers to the use of quotation marks as a way of casting doubt or derision on the quoted text.
• Screamer is a name for the exclamation mark.
• A section mark is a stylized S, that is usually printed as §, and used to designate a section of a text.
• The semicolon sign ; is used to indicate a shorter pause than that associated with a colon.
• A separatrix is a forward slash sign, /.
• A sharp sign is an element of music notation that indicates that a particular note is to be played a half step above its ordinary level. The sharp sign is NOT the same as the hash mark/pound sign/octothorpe, because it leans "to the left" rather than the right!
• A shebang is the character sequence #! which appears at the beginning of a Unix computer script to name the interpreter that should be used.
• A shilling sign is a forward slash sign, /, used in prices in the old English pounds/shillings/pence system, as in "In this size, 4/6", pronounced simply "four and six".
• A sigma spire is a sponge spicule shaped like the lower-case letter sigma.
• Sigmate or Sigmoid is a sort of a gentler S shape; in mathematics a generic sigmoid curve is flat, then rises for a while, and levels off. In anatomy, there is the sigmoid artery and the intestinal sigmoidal flexure. Because, in the uncial script, the lowercase letter sigma looked like the letter C, there are cases, especially in anatomy, where the intended shape is actually that of a C and not a Latin S or Greek Sigma.
• Sigmation is the appending of the letter s to a word, as when, in English, we form a plural, or indicate a possessive, or contract "is" or "has".
• Sigmatism is the excessive or incorrect use of the S sound. It can also designate lisping. But how about a name for the excessive use of the sh sound when an S sound is indicated? The youth of America has fallen prey to a mouth-full-of-oatmeal pronunciation that includes "shtreet", "shtrip", "shtraight", and other shtrictly shtupid shlurs.
• A Sigmodont is a member of a family of rats named for the distinctive (capital) Sigma shape of the ridges of enamel that appear on the crowns of worn molars (and rats do love to wear out their molars!).
• The Sigmoid Sinus is a Sigma-shaped sinus on each side of the brain.
• Sigmoidoscope - just to get a peek around the first bend of the intestinal sigmoidal flexure, we have this ingenious torture device.
• A silcrow is a stylized S, that is usually printed as §, better known as the section symbol.
• Siron is actually "S Iron", and is a strip of metal, bent into an S shape, and pounded into the end of a railroad tie to keep it from splitting.
• Slash is a name for the symbol /.
• A slant is a forward slash sign, /.
• Solidus is a name for the symbol /.
• Solmization, from "sol mi", is any method of assigning syllables to the notes of the musical scale. The standard solmization is:

  do (di) re (ri) mi fa (fi) sol (si) la (li) ti (si).

  but, you will not be surprised to hear, there are several others!
• Solresol is a universal language, ala Esperanto and Volapuk, with the difference that the language is formed using only the seven syllables of the standard solmization of the musical scale. This means, in particular, that the language can be "sung", although there is little likelihood that the random sequence of musical notes will sound pleasant! The language was devised by Jean Francois Sudre. Originally, he simply intended it as a means of encoding a message in French into musical notes, which could then be transmitting over a distance. During a battle, he supposed, messages could be sent across the battlefield using a bugle. After a time, Sudre invented an entire independent language and grammar associated with his musical syllables, and called the result the Universal Musical Language, although it quickly became known as solresol, (which means "language" in his scheme.). Words in this language were limited to at most five syllables. One and two syllable words were for common words and pronouns. The longer words were organized into topics according to the first syllable. Sudre was able to demonstrate his language by playing on the violin and having students announce the message he was sending. The seven syllables of the Solresol alphabet have been included in the Unicode system as U+E770 through U+E776. In May, 2007, at a festival honoring Athanasius Kircher, a scene from Romeo and Juliet was played in solresol!
• Splat is a computer user's name for the asterisk *.
• Star is a name for the asterisk *.
• Stigma is the name for both the variant form of the Greek letter Sigma that was used when it occurred at the end of a word, and the ligature (combined letter form) of Sigma and Tau.
• Stop or Full Stop is a name for the period symbol ..
• A Swash is an ornamental doo-dad or curlicue added to a letter; a swash font is whole set of such gaudy letters.
• A T and O map was a medieval map, based partly on information from Ptolemy, but presenting the world with Jerusalem at the center, Asia on top, with Europe and Africa filling the bottom left and right quarters, and a vast ocean surrounding the whole. The land masses were divided by waters that formed a rough T shape, and the surrounding ocean was the O.
• A T ball is a gentle introduction to baseball, in which the ball is placed on an inverted T rather than being pitched at the little batter, who would probably run away in terror.
• A T bandage is a T-shaped bandage used around the waist or perineum.
• A T back is a skimpy bathing suit which looks like a T in the back.
• A T bar is a metal bar having a cross section of a T, or a little piece of "body jewelry" used in piercing, or a kind of ski lift, or a kind of car roof that allows twin sunroofs, or a kind of strap on a shoe.
• An T beam is a steel beam whose profile is in the shape of the capital letter T.
• A T beam bridge is a reinforced concrete bridge made of a single slab whose cross-section at the supports resembles a series of T's.
• A T bevel is a tool with a long flat surface, and a long pivoted handle joined to the middle of the surface. When in its usual configuration, the tool looks like the letter T.
• A T bolt is a bolt that is not rounded, but has a sharp profile like a T.
• A T Bone Steak is a cut of meat in which the embedded bone forms a T.
• A T Bone Crash is a car crash in which one car hits another on the side, forming a T.
• A T budding, also called a "shield budding", is a plant budding in which an oval piece of bark bearing a scion bud is fitted into a T-shaped opening in the bark of the stock.
• A T Cart is an open 4 wheeled carriage with two seats, and a body shaped like a T.
• A T connector is a kind of electrical binding post;
• A T cushion is the technical name for the removable cushion in a stuffed chair, which looks like a very broad and squat T;
• A T dress is a variant of the T-shirt, but long enough to be used as a dress;
• A T formation is a way of positioning the offensive players in football. Three running backs are placed in the back field. The center, quarterback, and running backs then form a T shape.
• A T head bolt is a bolt with a flat head.
• A T head pier is a pier in the shape of a capital T, with a single walkway extending from the shore, which then terminates in a transverse section.
• A T hinge is a hinge in the shape of a capital T.
• A T iron is a rod with a short crosspiece at the end, used as a hook.
• A T joint is an electrical connection used for joining a branch conductor to a main conductor which continues beyond the branch.
• A T maze is a simple maze whose blind alleys end in short left and right turns, so that it looks as though it were constructed from a collection of T's, or, to a computer scientist, constructed through recursive application of the T function.
• A T mycoplasma is a viruslike microorganism, in a shape suggesting a T.
• A T nut is a nut shaped like the head of a T bolt;
• A T pin is a pin shapped like a T, typically formed by ingeniously bending a wire twice;
• A T plate is a T-shaped plate used as a splice and for stiffening a joint where the end of one beam abuts against the side of another.
• A T rail is a rail with a T-shaped cross-section.
• A T roof is a style of roof on a car, often seen on Corvettes.
• A T seawall is a thin concrete wall used to protect against flooding; it is distinguished by having a significant horizontal concrete supporting base, so that its cross-section is similar to the letter T.
• A T-shaped education, combining breadth across many fields and deep knowledge in one.
• A T Shirt is so named because you can flatten it out so that the arms of the shirt make the upper bar of the letter T.
• A T side advertisement is an oversize advertisement shaped like the letter T so that it can be displayed on the side of a double-decker bus, with the shaft of the T dropping down in the windows and the exit.
• A T slot nut has a profile like the letter T which allows it to be counter-sunk into a slot or groove, where it will resist turning.
• A T Square is a sort of drafting ruler shaped like the letter T, useful for making perpendiculars.
• A T strap is a T-shaped part of an open shoe formed by a strap rising from the throat over the instep and fastening to an ankle strap.
• A T top is a style of roof on a car, often seen on Corvettes.
• A T tube is a rubber tube in the shape of a T used to drain the common bile duct.
• A T wall is a movable concrete wall, made in sections, and arranged to form security barriers. The wall rests on a narrow base, and hence has the profile of the letter T.
• A T wrench is a T-shaped wrench consisting of a handle with a socket that fits on a nut.
• Tau was once the last letter of the Greek alphabet, and hence signified the final or last of a series. It also, apparently, was originally written more like an X.
• A Tau is the American toad fish, batrachus tau, which has markings on its body in the shape of the letter T.
• A Tau Cross is a crucifix shaped like the capital Greek letter Tau which, oddly enough, looks just like T.
• Tee is a way to spell the name of the letter "T".
• A tee is a wooden peg, with a T cross-section, used to support a golf ball.
• A tee is a metal bar or beam with a T cross-section.
• A tee is a three-way pipe joint shaped like a T.
• A tee is a Unix command tee which splits the output stream into two, the way a T-pipe would do to water.
• A tee shirt is a the old way of spelling "T shirt".
• A teetotaller is a person who completely abstains from alcohol. The tee- prefix is meant to emphasize the T in "total". It is not spelled teatotal and does not mean the person drinks nothing stronger than tea!
• A teetotum is a small top with four sides, marked with letters indicating outcomes. The top has a large T on one side, which gives it its name. The T stands for the Latin totum and means the player takes all of the prizes in the pot.
• The Tetragrammaton is the four letter name of God, usually transliterated as JHVH or YHWH. The name is supposedly "ineffable", but the fact that ancient Hebrew didn't consider vowel sounds important enough to write down is off-putting enough for me.
• Thorn was the name for an old English letter representing the "th" sound.
• A tilde is the wavy line symbol ~.
• A tittle is a very small diacritical mark or accent. It is used in the phrase "down to the last jot and tittle", to express the idea that even the tiniest details have been considered.
• A tramline is the nickname for the invented punctuation mark //, used in the Oxford English Dictionary to indicate a word that has been introduced from a foreign language. The name comes from the pair of metal rods used by a tram to connect with overhead electrical cables.
• Trigamma is a backformation from "Digamma", invented by mathematicians. Its written form resembles a capital F with three bars on the right. Mathematicians had already named a Gamma function, and a related Digamma function, and needed a name and symbol for a third, related function.
• Twiddle is a name for the wavy line symbol ~.
• U is the only primary vowel (we ignore "sometimes Y and W") whose name begins consonantly. The sound of a U is really "oo", but it has acquired the name "yoo". Thus, we say "an A, an E, an I, an O", but then we must say "a U", when in a better and more logical world, we'd be saying "an oo"! Another odd thing about U is that it began life as a V; it's not just that the Romans found it too hard to make a curved U on stone, they just didn't have the letter; V did double duty as consonant and vowel. Later, U began to be used as a separate representation for the vowel sounds that had been part of V's job.
• A U Bend is a section of pipe in the shape of a U for catching wedding rings and blocking noxious sewer gas;
• A U Bolt is a metal bolt in the shape of a U.
• A U Lock is a bicycle lock in the shape of a long U, often found keeping a bike rack from being stolen.
• A U Rail is a U shaped rail;
• A U shaped bottom is what happens when the stock market drops far, stays down for a while, and then comes back up.
• A U Stirrup is a stirrup for reinforced concrete in the shape of a U.
• A U Trap is a section of pipe in the shape of a U for catching wedding rings and blocking noxious sewer gas;
• A U Tube is a glass or plastic tube in the shape of a U;
• A U Turn is a reversal of direction, usually while driving a car.
• A U Valley is a valley with a wide rounded bottom, formed by the slow erosive action of a glacier rather than a river.
• An umlaut is a pair of dots that are a diacritical mark in German, used to indicate a modification of the sound of certain vowels, and equivalent to following the vowel by the letter e, as in Händel which is properly transliterated as Haendel.
• Upsilamba is a word invented by Vladimir Nabokov in Invitation to a Beheading, as a sort of archetypal obsolete letter of the alphabet, something whose rarety and obscurity represents the occasional unexpected surprises of life.
• Upsilon is a Greek letter whose name has a meaning. The psilon part of the name means "bare" or "mere"; this letter represents a short or unstressed "U" sound.
• Uzzard is an obsolete name for the letter Z.
• The V in cricket is the area of the field that falls between mid on and mid off.
• A flying V is a guitar favored by rock musicians whose body is shaped like a "V".
• V-6 and V-8 refer to car engines in which 6 or 8 cylinders are arranged in a "V" pattern.
• A V aerial is an antenna shaped like a "V".
• V beam radar is a height finding radar that emits a vertical beam and another at 45 degrees.
• A V belt is a belt with a V shaped cross section which engages a similarly shaped groove in a pulley.
• A V berth is a berth in the bow of a ship, which will have a V shape.
• A V block is a steel block with a V shaped groove used in machine tooling.
• A V bob is a strong frame shaped like an isosceles triangle, turning on a pivot at its apex, and used as a bell crank to change the direction of a main pump rod.
• A V bottom is a sailboat that is broad and shoal with a bottom in the form of a flat V.
• V connection is, of course, a connection in the shape of a V. Actually, this is a technical term in electrical networks that is more often called an open delta connection, and is used to temporarily supply three-phase power from two single phase sources. On wiring diagrams, the wires that produce this connection are drawn as a V.
• A V gear is a herringbone gear.
• A V guideway is a slotted path, with V-shaped indentations in the sides; a weight-bearing pallet is placed in the path. It has corresponding V-shaped projections which keep it firmly held within the path. It then glides along the path, carrying some load.
• A V hook is the V shaped opening of an eccentric rod in a steam engine.
• A V hut is a primitive hut in the shape of an inverted V.
• A V moth has a mark on each wing in the shape of a V.
• V neck is the name for shirts with an angular neck opening.
• A V notch is a V shaped notch in a weir used to measure water flow.
• A V particle is a subatomic particle named for the shape of its track in a cloud chamber.
• A V plasty is a surgical procedure in which a V-shaped piece of skin is removed.
• A V pug is a moth which has a mark on each wing in the shape of a V.
• A V roof is a peaked or gabled roof.
• An V shaped bottom is what happens when the stock market drops far and then immediately comes back up.
• A V-shaped comb is a comb on some domestic fowl with two hornlike sections that form a V.
• A V sign is the signal for "Victory", made by holding two fingers up to form the V shape.
• A V stern is a square stern with the transom inclined from the vertical.
• A V tail is a kind of V-shaped tail on an airplane that is also known as a ruddervator!.
• A V thread is a screw thread of 60 degrees.
• A V tool is a tool for cutting grooves.
• A V trick was an offensive formation in an early version of football.
• A V vat is a funnel box.
• Vee is a way of spelling the name of the letter "V".
• Vee is slang for a five dollar bill, because in Roman numerals, the letter V indicated the number 5.
• Vel, from a Latin word for "or", is another name for the symbol ||, or parallels, the pair of vertical lines that are used to indicate a logical "or".
• A Vinculum is an underline or overline used to indicate that a set of terms are to be grouped.
• A Virgule is a name for the backslash.
• Volle is a diacritical mark used in some Scandinavian words. It's a small o shape that appears above certain vowels.
• W is the only letter with a long name; rather than one syllable, it's an extravagant three! Moreover, it's the only name that makes sense: "Double U". Then again, it doesn't make sense. You can say U twice as long for an hour, and you'll never hear a W sound it in. And then there's the tragic fact that web site addresses begin with "www", taking a good nine syllables to pronounce.
• W is that letter that, back in the old days, was purported to be a vowel, as we learned when memorizing the list "A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y and W"; not a one of us knew a word that had a W as a vowel in it. Feverish contemplation of this matter got no further than the possibility that maybe it inherited its vowelity from the U that a W is two of. But finally, it was learned that in Welsh (not English, mind you!) the W is indeed a favored vowel, and that lunatic English people, attempting to pass off Welsh as a special case of English, inserted W into the list of vowels.
• A W cycle is a process involving two sequences of decrease and increase, and was specifically used to describe how a student who spends a year abroad first experiences a loss in confidence and comfort, then builds up strength, only to lose it again on returning to the home country, after which a final recovery occurs.
• A W Engine is an internal combustion engine with three sets of cylinders arranged side by side in three planes so that a cross section would have the shape of a W.
• Wen is the name of an old English letter that had a shape similar to a lower case "p", and was replaced by the letter W.
• Wye is supposed to be the preferred spelling of the name of Y, although a case could be made for "Why", "Wie", or "Wy".
• An X chair is a folding chair shaped like an X. This uncomfortable arrangement has actually been manufactured for thousands of years.
• The X chromosome and the Y chromosome are the two versions of the sex chromosome. They actually look like the letters X and Y; the male sex chromosome is missing a whole bunch of stuff (no comments, please), which makes a "male" sperm enough smaller and lighter than a female sperm to allow for sex selection via sorting.
• A X frame bridge is one in which X-shaped cross-braces are used.
• X height measures the size of a font in terms of the height of a letter like lowercase X that doesn't have an ascender or descender.
• X-ing is a visual pun for "crossing", because of "X's" convenient shape. Someone who has left or died can be "X-ed" out.
• X legs are legs that seem to bend inward at the knees, sometimes called "knock knees". German has the same term, X-beine.
• An X stretcher is a pair of support bars supporting other bars or joints, and forming an X.
• Y: In several European languages (Spanish, French, Romanian, Polish), the name of the letter Y is essentially Greek I, which points back to its heritage from is the Greek letter Upsilon, which originally had a soft u sound, and then shifted to a y sound. The Romans used the letter Y to represent Upsilon when they transliterated certain Greek words.
• A Y back shirt is a style of undershirt in which the shoulder straps come together to form the shape of the letter Y.
• A Y box is a box containing three wires of equal resistance which meet at a point, used in a three-phase electrical system.
• A Y branch is a piece of pipe shaped like a Y that allows two pipes to join into a single system.
• A Y bridge is a bridge constructed by a miserly town such as Zanesville, Ohio, in the form of a Y, forcing traffic to merge and diverge on the constricted bridge, and, in the deluded minds of the city elders, constituting a folly worthy of tourist attention.
• Y connection
• Y cross - a kind of passing play in football.
• A Y curve is a schematic graph suggesting a situation in which some quantity begins decreasing, then drops drastically to zero, rises again suddenly and then gradually increases back to its original level, tracing out the letter Y while doing so.
• Y front is the term used for the pattern made by the elaborate flaps on jockey briefs, which theoretically may be used when urinating. The Y is actually upside down.
• A Y gun is a gun on an anti-submarine ship, shaped like a Y so that it can fire depth charges on both sides of the ship simultaneously.
• A Y junction is a place where three roads meet.
• A Y level is a surveyor's level with a telescope supported in Y shaped rests.
• The Y ligament is the iliofemoral ligament, which has the shape of a Y.
• A Y moth has Y markings on its wings.
• A Y plasty is a surgical procedure which makes a Y-shaped incision to reduce scar contractures.
• A Y point is the neutral point for a three phase electrical circuit. The diagram of the circuit's behavior looks like a Y near the neutral point.
• A Y theodolite is a surveying instrument which is shaped like the letter Y to provide support for the telescope.
• A Y tile is tile shaped like a Y, and used for drains or gutters.
• A Y track or Wye track is a railroad siding shaped like a Y which allows trains coming from either direction to turn off.
• Y tube is a type of vacuum discharge tube designed by William Crookes for his experimental work.
• A Y turn is the sharp, economical way of turning a car around by going into reverse and turning at the same time until the back of the car has gone 90 degrees, then turning the front wheels and going forward in the direction from which one came. The track of the car is similar to the letter Y.
• Y worm is a worm which looks like a Y, but is actually two worms, a large female and a small male, in permanent copulation.
• Yogh is an old English letter you should be glad you don't have to pronounce. Remnants of it show up as "gh" in words like "light" and "tough".
• Ypsiloid and Ypsiliform mean "Y shaped", although they actually refer to the name Upsilon and the shape of the capital form of this letter (which is usually rendered as a Y with drooping branches).
• Ypsilon, a variant spelling of the name of the Greek letter Upsilon.
• A Z bar or Z beam or Z iron is a metal construction unit or angle iron with a cross section like a Z.
• A Z bed is a portable bed which folds up into a Z shape.
• A Z crank is a crank in the shape of the letter Z.
• A Z fold is a brochure made by printing on both sides of a single sheet of paper, which is then folded into thirds.
• A Z frame bridge is one in which a Z-shaped cross-brace is used.
• A Z-plasty is a surgical technique in which cuts are made in a Z shape so that the cuts, once stitched up, have less stress and heal more easily.
• A Z twist is the twist in yarn induced by a clockwise-spinning spindle.
• A Z'd frame is a custom car modification that lowers the car by cutting the rear frame rails and rewelding them in a stretched Z shape.
• Zad is an obsolete name for the letter Z.
• Zalambdodont is a group of insectivorous mammals whose molars have a ridge shaped like a V or capital Lambda.
• Zed is the English name for good old Zee. When Henry Higgins sang "In France every Frenchman knows his language from A to Zed," I thought he said every Frenchman knows his language may transcend, because I'd never heard of Zed before.
• To zed about is to zig-zag, and reflects the shape of the letter Z.
• Zedland is a joking reference to the English counties of Devonshire, Dorsetshire and Somersetshire, where in colloquial speech the "S" sound is replaced by a "Z".
• Zee is a way of spelling the name of the letter "Z".
• Z-plasty is a surgical procedure for treating scar tissue, using a Z shaped incision. I guess Sergeant Garcia was the guinea pig in the development of this technique.

Sometimes, a plausible but erroneous etymology exists:

• The H bone or Aitch bone is the hip bone of a cow. But it's not shaped like an H and the name doesn't come from H in any way. Etymologically, the name comes from nache bone or buttock bone, and lost the initial n in the same way as napple became apple.
• Thole - is a T-shaped hole cut into high-sided wooden rowboats for the oars. However, the name does not come from T-hole but is an old English word ultimately related to the German word "dulden" which means "to bear" a burden. (Thanks to Dick Seabrook.)

Not quite worthy of the list are:

• Aleph Null
• B movie
• C section
• a G string isn't shaped like a G, but no one seems to know quite how it got its name.
• Gamma rays were simply the third kind of radiation to be detected from the newly discovered element radium. And, at least in Greek, Gamma is the third letter of the alphabet.
• Gee Pole refers to a pole used to steer a sled.
• Ineffable - Mike Lambert wants to know if the ineffable name is the one that can't be used in an "effing" expression... I thought we had work to do!
• K car
• K gun - merely a model designation for a Vickers machine gun.
• V mail
• X rays