When the White Queen of Looking Glass fame bragged that she could read words of one letter, she beseeched Alice not to be discouraged, promising "You'll come to it in time." Indeed, the Queen's one letter word vocabulary was more comprehensive than one might first assume. A word is any letter or group of letters which has meaning and is used as a unit of language. So even though there are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, they stand for over seven hundred distinct units of meaning. An abbreviation, on the other hand, is a letter used in place of a larger word. It is usually capitalized. An abbreviation is not a word. Therefore, abbreviations in the Dictionary of One-Letter Words are clearly marked as such. |
