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The California Job Case was a compartmentalized box for printing in the 19th century, sizes corresponding to the commonality of letters. The frequency of letters in text has been studied for use in cryptanalysis, and frequency analysis in particular, dating back to the Arab mathematician al-Kindi (c. AD 801–873 ), who formally developed the method (the ciphers breakable by this technique go ...
List of American words not widely used in the United Kingdom; List of British words not widely used in the United States; List of South African English regionalisms; List of words having different meanings in American and British English: A–L; List of words having different meanings in American and British English: M–Z
American English pronunciation of "no highway cowboys" /noʊ ˈhaɪweɪ ˈkaʊbɔɪz/, showing five diphthongs: / oʊ, aɪ, eɪ, aʊ, ɔɪ / A diphthong (/ ˈ d ɪ f θ ɒ ŋ, ˈ d ɪ p-/ DIF-thong, DIP-; [1] from Ancient Greek δίφθογγος (díphthongos) 'two sounds', from δίς (dís) 'twice' and φθόγγος (phthóngos) 'sound'), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is ...
This vocalic w generally represented /uː/, [3] [4] as in wss ("use"). [5] However at that time the form w was still sometimes used to represent a digraph uu (see W), not as a separate letter. In modern Welsh, "W" is simply a single letter which often represents a vowel sound. Thus words borrowed from Welsh may use w this way, such as:
New loan words may exhibit vowel disharmony; for example, olympialaiset ('Olympic games') and sekundäärinen ('secondary') have both front and back vowels. In standard Finnish, these words are pronounced as they are spelled, but many speakers apply vowel harmony – olumpialaiset, and sekundaarinen or sekyndäärinen.
The letters A, E, I, O, and U are considered vowel letters, since (except when silent) they represent vowels, although I and U represent consonants in words such as "onion" and "quail" respectively. The letter Y sometimes represents a consonant (as in "young") and sometimes a vowel (as in "myth").
The letter Y was used to represent the sound /y/ in Old English, so Latin u , y and i were all used to represent distinct vowel sounds. But, by the time of Middle English, /y/ had lost its roundedness and became identical to i (/iː/ and /ɪ/). Therefore, many words that originally had i were spelled with y , and vice versa.
The Words of the Year usually reflect events that happened during the years the lists were published. For example, the Word of the Year for 2005, 'integrity', showed that the general public had an immense interest in defining this word amid ethics scandals in the United States government, corporations, and sports. [ 1 ]