Letter

How to spell letter

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce letter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does letter mean?

1. nounA written or printed message addressed to a person and usually sent by post.
2. nounA single written or printed character representing a sound in the alphabet.

Letter in a sentence

• She posted the letter to her bank on Monday morning.

• The password must contain at least one capital letter and a number.

• The resignation letter sat unsigned on his desk for a week.

• The child traced each letter of the alphabet on the practice sheet.

Where does letter come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word travelled into English from the Latin littera, which meant a single character of the alphabet and, in its plural litterae, came to mean a written document or even learning and literature as a whole. The Romans passed the word to Old French as lettre, and English borrowed it during the early Middle Ages, well before 1300, keeping both the alphabetic sense and the sense of a written message. The same littera root is hiding inside the everyday words 'literate', 'literature', and 'literal', all of which circle back to the idea of letters on a page. The original Latin spelling carried the doubled t, which is exactly why English keeps the double t in 'letter' today, a useful anchor when the second, unstressed syllable blurs into a vague schwa.

How the word is built

• letter (from Latin littera: a written character)
• no suffix; the doubled t reflects the Latin form littera