We stumbled upon a spooky yet poetic mention of one-letter words in an article about brainstorming for graphic designers:

[J]ot down some one letter words that best describe your idea.
For example: sunset, skeleton, dark and death.

Sunset, skeleton, dark, and death.  Are these truly one-letter words?  (Delightful of you to ask, by the way!)  They are, indeed!

Sunsets recall more than a single one-letter word:  While the French poet Victor Hugo famously said that "O is the sun," astronomers use a different one-letter word to designate the class of yellow stars to which our sun belongs: G.  Additionally, in the ionosphere, the E layer develops around sunset, at an altitude of 90-130km.

Skeletons recall the letter R.  In organic chemistry, "The letter R represents the carbon skeleton of the molecule" (Gerard Tortora, Principles of Anatomy and Physiology, 2005).  And novelist William Gibson has noted "the color of glow-in-the-dark toy skeletons, each with its own iconic M" (Pattern Recognition, 2003). 

Darkness recalls M, a state of deep, dreamless sleep in which consciousness is "lost in darkness" (Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image, 1974).  Poet Tom Sleigh describes an injured driver's face, "each eye / an x of darkness" ("The Wreck," The Dreamhouse, 1999).

Death recalls Z, as in Arnold Yarrow's Death is a Z (1978).  It also recalls O, as in cultural theorist Earl Jackson, Jr.'s "big O of death" (Strategies of Deviance, 1995).

Sunset, skeleton, dark, and death: all highly evocative definitions of our ABCs!

Having been unnaturally infatuated with the Wolverine for some time, I note (without spoiling the riddle) this magnificent animal's little-known facility with ironic one-liners, e.g. "Have you eaten yet?"  Just fyi.

"We are all like cornflakes."
—Jeff of Omegaword, spoofing Lewis Black's "We are all like snowflakes."  See our snowflake finds: one, two, three, four.

"We are all like snowflakes."
—comedian Lewis Black

(This snowflake is "The Love of Icarus" by Rodney Leong, incorporating 20,664 plastic collar stays.  Read more here.  Thank you, m0ddie!)

by svenwerk