Uppercase “B” Used to Have Just One Bowl, Not Two

09/08/2026

Look at capital “B” in almost any typeface and you’ll see two stacked bowls attached to a single vertical stem....

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Uppercase “A” Has Been Upside Down This Whole Time — Sort Of

08/08/2026

Every letter in this series so far has been lowercase, tracing a shared story of medieval scribes rounding out Roman...

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“z” Was Nearly Kicked Out of the Latin Alphabet Entirely

06/08/2026

“z” closes out the lowercase alphabet in more ways than one: it’s the last letter alphabetically, and it’s also one...

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Lowercase “y” Descends From a Greek Letter That Never Should Have Needed to Exist

04/08/2026

“y” has an identity problem baked into its history: the Romans borrowed it from Greek specifically to write foreign words,...

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Why “x” Became the Universal Symbol for the Unknown

02/08/2026

“x” barely shows up in ordinary English words, yet it’s everywhere in math, movie ratings, kisses at the end of...

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“w” Is Literally “Double U” — But It Was Never Actually Two “u”s

01/08/2026

The name gives it away before you even look at the shape: “w” is called “double-u” in English, a name...

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