Perfect Bound Press One-Letter Words A Dictionary

INTRODUCTION
WHEN THE WORDS GET IN THE WAY
Ninety- nine down: a one letter word meaning
something indefi nite.
The indefinite article or—would it perhaps be the
personal pronoun?
But what runs across it? Four letter word meaning
something
With a bias towards its opposite, the second letter
Must be the same as the one letter word.
It is time
We left these puzzles and started to be ourselves.
And started to live, is it not?
—Louis MacNeice, Solstices
W
e live in a world of mass communication.
As you read this, words are staring you
in the face. But they’re not the only ones.
Miles above you, words are flown in jets
across the country and over the oceans. They are
tossed at 5 a.m. on newspaper routes. They are deliv
-
ered six days a week by mail carriers. They’re propped
up on display at book stores. They’re bouncing off
satellites and showing up on television and cell phone
screens.
We are constantly bombarded by language pollution.
And these empty words are overwhelming. Either they
scream out to be noticed (as in TV commercials), or
they hide in small print (at the bottom of contracts),
or they bury their meaning behind jargon (generated
by computers and bureaucracy).
It’s enough to make you speechless.
Have you ever started to write a letter only to realize
that you have nothing to report? “Dear Jan: Nothing
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exciting has happened here this month.” No news may
be good news, but it still doesn’t amount to anything.
Sometimes you do have something to say, but “the
words get in the way.” You can’t find the precise word
for what you mean, and every word you can think of
gives the wrong impression or is misleading.
The solution is to get back to basics. Put your trust in
the ABC’s. With this dictionary of one- letter words,
you have the power to fight jargon and to simplify
modern communication. It’s now up to you.
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THE SKINNY ON THE DICTIONARY OF
ONE- LETTER WORDS
“I’ll tell you a secret—I can read words of one letter!
Isn’t that grand?”
—The White Queen to Alice in Through the Looking Glass
E
ver since I wrote the very first edition of One-
Letter Words: A Dictionary, I haven’t had to
pay for a single drink. But I didn’t set out to
create the ultimate secret weapon for win
-
ning bar bets. I mean, a dictionary is supposed to be
scholarly, right? Then again, a dictionary like mine
obviously doesn’t belong sitting on a dusty reference
shelf next to a highbrow encyclopedia. Something this
weird was bound to grow wings of its own, and it has
now found itself at the center of an Internet phenom
-
enon, the recipient of a tribute song in Sweden, the
subject of radio programs, and even a prop in stand-
up comedy routines. Why? “Y” indeed!
Upon being told about my dictionary, the average per-
son will laugh in disbelief, then—certain that I must
be joking—ask just how many one- letter words there
could possibly be. Nine out of ten people will guess
that there are just two: the pronoun I and the article a.
The occasional smarty- pants will grant that O might
make a third, as in “O Romeo!” It’s when I retort
that there are 1,000 one- letter words that wagers get
made—and won.
The fact of the matter is that a word is any letter or
group of letters that has meaning and is used as a unit
of language. So even though there are only twenty- six
letters in the English alphabet, my research shows
that they stand for 1,000 distinct units of meaning.
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One- letter words are the building blocks of commu-
nication. I like to joke that learning them is easy and
spelling them is even easier. But I definitely don’t sell
them short.
The most important English words are small ones.
And those small words—which occur most often in
our speech, reading, and writing—are relatively few
in number. Just ten words account for 25 percent of
all the words we use, and they all have only one sylla
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ble. Fifty words account for 50 percent of all the words
in our speech, and they, too, all have only one syllable.
Two of the top six words we use in speech and writ-
ing have only one letter: a and I. A is the third most
frequently occurring word in the English language. I
is the sixth most frequently occurring. And there are
other important one- letter words, which comprise the
majority of my dictionary.
One of my favorites has to be X, which boasts more
than seventy definitions of its own. X marks the spot
on a pirate’s map where treasure is buried. It’s a hobo
symbol meaning handouts are available. X tells you
where to sign your name on a contract, and it’s also an
illiterate person’s signature. X indicates a choice on a
voting ballot and a cross- stitch of thread. Mysterious
people may be named Madame X, and the archetype of
a mad scientist is Dr. X. X is an incorrect answer on a
test, and it’s a rating for an adult movie. X is a power
of magnification, an axis on a graph, and a female
chromosome. It is a multiplication operator, a letter of
the alphabet, and an arbitrary point in time. X is a kiss
at the end of a love letter.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I first got the idea
to write a dictionary of one- letter words. I remember
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once hearing about a bizarre Japanese crime novel
from 1929, The Devil’s Apprentice by Shiro Hamao,
and how the entire work consisted of a single letter.
The single letter was obviously a written correspon
-
dence, but I initially envisioned a single letter of the
alphabet. And I marveled at how bizarre indeed it
would be to write a detective story that all boiled
down to a solitary letter of the alphabet. I imagined
some sort of gritty retelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
novel The Scarlet Letter in which a bloody letter A
would serve as the only scrap of evidence to unravel a
seedy tale of adultery, heartbreak, and murder.
I also remember how the poet Karen Drayne once
wrote about an imaginary country where the lan
-
guage is so simple they have only one letter in the
alphabet, and it works because “Context is everything.”
That got me thinking about how a single letter of the
alphabet can represent all sorts of distinct meanings
depending on the context.
I wrote the very first entry for my dictionary in a fi t
of procrastination. I was in graduate school, spending
many hours a day in the library, purportedly working
on my thesis. All those enormous unabridged diction
-
aries on the shelves intrigued me, and on a whim I
started looking up the entries for the twenty- six letters
of the alphabet. I jotted down all sorts of fascinating
tidbits, and those notes became the bare bones for my
dictionary of one- letter words. But I wasn’t content
to end it there. I knew that there must be even more
meanings, and I went on a quest to discover them,
scouring novels, plays, newspaper articles, magazine
features, movie scripts, and writings on the Internet.
I wasn’t satisfied with collecting mere defi nitions,
however. I wanted to prove the legitimacy of those
x
definitions with actual examples from literature. For
example, one defi nition of T is “perfectly,” and I found
a simple quotation from the eighteenth- century novel
Tristram Shandy to accompany it: “We could manage
this matter to a T.” For a rather boring defi nition of W,
“someone designated W,” I found a line by comedian
Woody Allen: “Should I marry W? Not if she won’t tell
me the other letters in her name!”
The occasional idiosyncratic usage of a one- letter
word didn’t bother me, because I knew that people
were discovering new concepts every day. Shake-
speare, for example, coined more than 1,500 new
words that were adopted into the popular culture. If
people were using one- letter words in new ways, I
wanted to be there to document them.
About four years ago, I finally put a free version of the
book online at blueray.com, as a way of sharing my
research with whatever audience I could find. I dedi
-
cated the Web version of my dictionary to the White
Queen character from Through the Looking Glass. She
famously told Alice, “I’ll tell you a secret—I can read
words of one letter! Isn’t that grand?” It turned out
that the White Queen and I weren’t the only ones who
were finding one- letter words to be grand.
All on its own, the online version of my dictionary was
creating a firestorm of interest. In a matter of weeks,
nearly 1,200 other Web sites were linking to my site.
One hundred and forty of those sites were university,
high school, and community libraries that recom
-
mend my dictionary on their reference links pages.
Bloggers were reviewing my work as well, giving it
some funny praise. Doug MacClure called it “The most
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perverse yet serious reference manual on the Web.”
Edward Pelegrino called it “Interesting and possibly
useful.” (I like his use of the word possibly. It’s so full
of possibilities!) The Martinova blog dubbed it “Fun
for bored lit- geeks.” I got the biggest kicks when I
found out the likes of professional wordsmith Richard
Lederer and Encyclopædia Britannica Online were
linking to my site. All this Web linkage reassured me
that while my research might be quirky it wasn’t nec
-
essarily superfl uous.
Before I knew it, CNET Radio was e- mailing me to do
a spot on a morning program. I was initially terrifi ed,
but I made it through an interview with talk show
host Alex Bennett in his “Weird Web Wednesday” seg
-
ment.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, a musician in Sweden
was recording a tribute to my dictionary entitled, you
guessed it, “The Dictionary of One- Letter Words.” Art
-
ist Kristofer Ström, whose band is called Ljudbilden
& Piloten, composed his ambient rock–style tribute
using guitar, bass, zither, trumpet, strings, drums,
human voice, and field recordings. Released by the
Barcelona label Nosordo Records in 2003, the track is
still receiving radio play.
As I read for pleasure, now and then I continue to fi nd
new examples of usage to quote in my dictionary. So
the project is always growing and evolving. In addi-
tion to the free online version at blueray.com, a print
edition is available through CafePress.com.
I’ve lately branched out to write two smaller compan-
ion dictionaries: all- consonant words and all- vowel
words. These have been of particular interest to
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Scrabble players, especially since I seek to document
my definitions with literary citations. However, com
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petitive Scrabble players have to be sticklers when it
comes to rules, and I don’t care to get in the middle of
any controversy. I just do this stuff for fun.
To the best of my knowledge, my dictionary of one-
letter words is the first- known such volume since the
sixteenth century, when a Buddhist lexicographer
named Saddhammakitti enumerated Pali words of
one letter in a work entitled Ekakkharakosa. It may
have taken 300 years to bridge the gap, but I like to
think that Saddhammakitti’s tradition lives on in my
own dictionary of one- letter words.
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