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The term four-letter word serves as a euphemism for words that are often considered profane or offensive.. The designation "four-letter" arises from the observation that many (though not all) popular or slang terms related to excretory functions, sexual activity, genitalia, blasphemies, and terms linked to Hell or damnation are incidentally four-character monosyllables.
In the majority of alternades, every second letter is used to make two smaller words, but in some cases, every third letter is used to make three smaller words. Theoretically, a very long word could use every fourth letter to make four smaller words; e.g., «partitioned» is an alternade for «pin», «ate», «rid», and «to».
In many word games, notably in Scrabble, a player must build a word using a certain set of letters. If a player is obliged to use a q, but does not have a u, it may be possible to play words from this list. Not all words in this list are acceptable in Scrabble tournament games.
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Frequency analysis, the study of the frequency of letters or groups of letters; Letter frequencies; Oxford English Corpus; Swadesh list, a compilation of basic concepts for the purpose of historical-comparative linguistics; Zipf's law, a theory stating that the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in a frequency table
initialism = an abbreviation pronounced wholly or partly using the names of its constituent letters, e.g., CD = compact disc, pronounced cee dee; pseudo-blend = an abbreviation whose extra or omitted letters mean that it cannot stand as a true acronym, initialism, or portmanteau (a word formed by combining two or more words).
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").
Ü (lowercase ü) is a Latin script character composed of the letter U and the diaeresis diacritical mark. In some alphabets such as those of a number of Romance languages or Guarani it denotes an instance of regular U to be construed in isolation from adjacent characters with which it would usually form a larger unit; other alphabets like the Azerbaijani, Estonian, German, Hungarian and ...