---
title: "When was a letter last added to the English alphabet?"
description: "J and U separated from I and V, settling by the seventeenth century, The 1500s and 1600s. What happened, and whether it plausibly could happen again."
url: https://atoneplace.net/the-last-time/letter-added-alphabet/
site: "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

- [When did the London Underground last gain a line?](https://atoneplace.net/the-last-time/london-underground-line/)
- [When did the tallest building in the world last change?](https://atoneplace.net/the-last-time/tallest-building/)
- [When did the prime meridian last move?](https://atoneplace.net/the-last-time/prime-meridian/)
- [When did the Olympics last award medals for art?](https://atoneplace.net/the-last-time/olympic-art/)
- [When were the Olympic Games last cancelled?](https://atoneplace.net/the-last-time/olympics-cancelled/)
- [When was a leap year last skipped?](https://atoneplace.net/the-last-time/leap-year-skipped/)
- [Everything, most recent first](https://atoneplace.net/the-last-time/)

## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]