Memorizing the Alphabet

The English language uses a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters. This number is comparable to many other phonetic alphabet systems. Twenty six is not an incredibly large number, yet it has given me much difficulty throughout my life. As a child too much time was spent alphabetizing words for the tedious homework tasks given to me by my elementary teachers. As an adult, I embarrassingly still mumble the alphabet song to myself when looking up words in an appendix or dictionary. There seems to be no apparent organization of letters in the accepted sequencing of the alphabet. Shouldn't Q join X and Z at the end? Or maybe the vowels should be grouped together. Since it is the 21st century, we could even use a sequence modeled from Dvorak's Simplified Keyboard. Dvorak studied letter frequencies and the physiology of people's hands and created a layout to adhere to these principles in order to improve typing proficiency over the now accepted QWERTY standard. And just like the QWERTY keyboard, it looks like the organization of the alphabet is not going to change.

So, I have realized it may be worth my time to take matters into my own hand. I will unnaturally acquire the intuitive feel for letter sequencing that others have obtained through their life. I propose doing this through assigning numerical values to each letter. Numbers, have arguably the most intuitive organization imaginable. If one obtains immediate knowledge of the numerical placement of each letter in the alphabet, alphabetizing becomes trivial.

I started this process briefly in the car. Some letters seemed easier to me than others. Obviously A, B, C, and Z are easy. Some other ones to note: H = 8 - they look similar, I = 9 and L = 12 - they sound similar. Counter intuitively, M, which is symmetric, is 13 an odd value not divisible by 2 while N, an antisymmetric letter, is 14 and perfectly divisible by 2. Also, G would never have struck me as being the luckiest letter in the alphabet, but I'm not surprised about M being unlucky.

I could go on about the feeling letters give me and the associations I make from them, but it would detract from the point of this article and also take away from its credibility. I have posted the letters and their corresponding values for others to think about. In the future, I would like to create an interactive website for memorizing alphabetic values.

A = 1
B = 2
C = 3
D = 4
E = 5
F = 6
G = 7
H = 8
I = 9
J = 10
K = 11
L = 12
M = 13
N = 14
O = 15
P = 16
Q = 17
R = 18
S = 19
T = 20
U = 21
V = 22
W = 23
X = 24
Y = 25
Z = 26