LETTER WORDS

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.
• 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.
• A shirt is a "T shirt" with no arms at all.
• A to Z suggests full and complete coverage of a subject.
• Aitch is the most interesting name of a letter. 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.
• 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.
• 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".
• Asterisk is the star-shaped mark *.
• Asterism is a pattern of up and down stars, something like:

              *   *   *
                *   *
            

• 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".
• 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!
• 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.
• C clamp is a clamp in the shape of the letter C.
• C-fold towels are paper towels made by folding two opposite sides to meet in the middle, forming a sort of flat C.
• C hole is the C shaped sound hole in viols and guitars.
• C post is a C shaped pillar on the side of a car, which connects the floor and the roof.
• A C scroll is a kind of ornamental C-shaped scroll design on furniture.
• C spring
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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."
• 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.
• 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.
• Crunch is another name for the pound sign or hash mark.
• Cue might be how you spell Q, but then again, maybe it's Kew, Kue, Ku, Kyu or 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.
• 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 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.
• Delta is the Greek letter shaped like a triangle suggested the fan shape of the alluvial deposits at a river's mouth.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Double-U is the name for W which is, of course, Double-V, at least in looks. Compare Digamma and Trigamma, two obsolete Greek letters which were shaped like Gamma but with two and three side bars.
• Ecphonesis means "outcry" and is a fancy name for the exclamation mark.
• Effing is a euphemism for whatever unseemly obscenity might begin with F.
• 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 and En denote horizontal measures of printing space equivalent to that required by M and N respectively.
• End Slug is the name of the filled-in box used to denote the end of an article in a newspaper or magazine.
• 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 and Sampi, which were sometimes listed at the end of the alphabet, and primarily used in the alphanumeric coding.
• Epsilon and Upsilon are two Greek letters whose names have meaning. The psilon part of the names means "bare" or "mere"; these letters represent short or unstressed "E" and "U" sounds. I believe the long "E" sound is Eta but I don't know whether there is a corresponding long "U" sound, perhaps in the attic of discarded Greek letters.
• Eroteme is a name for the question mark.
• Ess is the common way of spelling out the name of S.
• Eth or Edh is an old English letter which looks like a crossed D, and represents a "th" sound.
• 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.
• 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.
• Fistnote is the name for the little pointing hand icon.
• A Flubdub, also called a dingbat, is any kind of ornamental or fancy letter or symbol.
• Fluctustress is a sort of wavy underlining.
• Full stop is a name for 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?
• 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.
• Gamma moth is a kind of moth which has markings similar to Gamma on its wings.
• Gammacism is difficulty in pronouncing velar consonants such as G and K.
• 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 Pole
• Gee Throw
• 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.
• H beam is a metal beam with the cross-section of an H. How you distinguish this from an I beam is not my concern.
• 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.
• H hinge is a hinge with leaves which, when open, resemble the letter H.
• 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.
• Hash or hash mark is a name for the symbol #.
• Hyoid literally means something shaped like the Greek letter Upsilon, and refers to a U shaped bone at the root of the tongue.
• 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.
• Hypsiloid literally means something shaped like the Greek letter Upsilon.
• I bar is a steel beam whose profile is in the shape of the capital letter I.
• I beam is a steel beam whose profile is in the shape of the capital letter I.
• 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.
• I girder is a steel beam whose profile is in the shape of the capital letter I.
• I hat
• I iron is a steel beam whose profile is in the shape of the capital letter I.
• I ring is a band or metal hoop that goes around a metal drum.
• 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 is the conversion of other vowel sounds into that of iota, or, in English, the long e sound.
• Izzard is an obsolete name for Z, compared to which Zed looks positively normal.
• J bag
• J bar
• 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.
• 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 stick
• J stroke is a rowing stroke, in the course of which the end of the paddle or oar traverses the figure of a J.
• 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.
• Jot is a very small thing, used in the phrase "down to the last jot and tittle", and derived from the letter iota. A tittle, by the way, is a very small diacritical mark or accent.
• K gun
• 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 is an obsolete Greek letter, used in the alphanumeric coding system to represent 90.
• L 7 - a square, an unhip person, from the shape formed by the two symbols put together.
• An L bar is a steel beam in the shape of an L.
• An L block is an L-shaped concrete building block.
• L head
• 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 a long long time.
• 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.
• A Lambda virus is shaped like the Greek letter Lambda, 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 Mr Lee by making him say the shibboleth "I'm really Larry the Raleigh lorry roller."
• Lambdoid or Lambdoidal means shaped like the letter Lambda. In particular, there is a suture between the occipital bone and the two parietal bones of the skull known as the lambdoidal suture.
• A lemniscus is a name for the symbol we now use for the division sign, made by combining a colon and a dash.
• A ligature is like that band of skin that joined the Chang and Eng, the Siamese twins. It appears in certain words derived from Latin, such as Cæsar or fœtal.
• 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 roof is a roof with a double peak.
• A macron is the horizontal bar used to mark long vowels.
• The O sign is made by a 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 "sharp", "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.
• Omega and Omicron are the names of two letters of the Greek alphabet. But their names have meaning: "big O" and "little O", in reference to the long and short "O" sounds they represent.
• Omegoidal refers to things (if any?) in the shape of omega.
• 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 the name for the double vertical bar ||.
• 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.
• 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.
• Pound Sign is a name for the symbol #, which is also called the number sign, hash mark, or hatch mark.
• 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.
• R Color is the addition of an R sound to a vowel.
• R-less
• 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 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), as a symbol of how, once one deviates ever so slightly from the path of virtue, one wanders increasingly far away.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 shilling sign is a forward slash sign, /.
• A sigma spire is a sponge spicule shaped like the 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.
• Sigmatism is the excessive or incorrect use of the S sound. 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.
• 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.
• 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 /.
• Splat is a computer user's name for the asterisk *.
• Star is a name for the asterisk *.
• 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 kind of ski lift.
• 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.
• T bevel.
• 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;
• T formation
• T 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 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 Shirt - so named, I supposed, because you can flatten it out so that the arms of the shirt make the upper bar of the letter T.
• A T slot
• 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 tube is a rubber tube in the shape of a T used to drain the common bile duct.
• 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.
• Tau - 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.
• A tee is a three-way pipe joint shaped like a T, a metal bar or beam with a T cross-section, or a Unix command tee which splits the output stream into two, the way a T-pipe would do to water.
• 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 ~.
• 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 ~.
• 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.
• Uzzard is an obsolete name for the letter Z.
• The V in cricket is the area of the filed that falls between mid on and mid off.
• V-6 and V-8 refer to car engines in which 6 or 8 cylinders are arranged in a "V" pattern.
• 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 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
• V gear is a herringbone gear.
• V guideway
• 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.
• 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 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 vat is a funnel box.
• Vee is slang for a five dollar bill, because of the Roman numeral V.
• 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.
• 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 the preferred spelling of the name of Y, although a case could be made for "Why" or "Wy".
• An X chair is a folding chair shaped like an X. This uncomfortable arrangement has actually been manufacture for thousands of years.
• X chromosome and 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.
• 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.
• X stretcher is a pair of support bars supporting other bars or joints, and forming an X.
• Y box is a box containing three wires of equal resistance which meet at a point, used in a three-phase electrical system.
• 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
• Y curve
• 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 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 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.
• Y theodolite
• A Y tile is tile shaped like a Y used for drains or gutters.
• A Y track is a railroad siding shaped like a Y which allows trains coming from either direction to turn off.
• Y tube
• 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
• A Z bar or Z beam is a metal construction unit with a cross section like a Z.
• A Z crank is a crank in the shape of the letter Z.
• Z iron
• 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.
• 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.