At One Place

When was a letter last added to the English alphabet?

When was a letter last added to the English alphabet?
The 1500s and 1600s
J and U separated from I and V, settling by the seventeenth century

Classical Latin had no J or U: I served as both vowel and consonant, and V did the same. Gian Giorgio Trissino argued for distinguishing J from I in 1524, and the split settled into English printing over the following century. Nothing has been added since. The ampersand was for a time recited as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet — "and per se and", which is where the word ampersand comes from — and was dropped in the nineteenth century.

What
J and U separated from I and V, settling by the seventeenth century
When
The 1500s and 1600s
Category
Everyday things
Could this change?
Not in any foreseeable way. The event is closed.

Everyday things

Question When
When did the London Underground last gain a line? 24 May 2022
When did the tallest building in the world last change? 2010
When did the prime meridian last move? 1984
When did the Olympics last award medals for art? 1948
When were the Olympic Games last cancelled? 1944
When was a leap year last skipped? 1900

This page gives a date and never a "years ago". These pages are built as static files, so a computed interval would freeze at build time and quietly become wrong — which on a reference site is worse than making the reader do the subtraction.

Common questions

When was a letter last added to the English alphabet?
The 1500s and 1600s — J and U separated from I and V, settling by the seventeenth century.
What happened?
Classical Latin had no J or U: I served as both vowel and consonant, and V did the same. Gian Giorgio Trissino argued for distinguishing J from I in 1524, and the split settled into English printing over the following century. Nothing has been added since. The ampersand was for a time recited as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet — "and per se and", which is where the word ampersand comes from — and was dropped in the nineteenth century.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked