The last letter added to the alphabet wasn’t Z. The answer you’ll usually find is J, the 26th and final letter of the modern English alphabet to become a letter in its own right.
But J didn’t arrive in a single moment. It grew slowly out of I. Meanwhile, U was going through almost exactly the same process with V, and W had already taken a strange route of its own. So the story of the last letter is really the story of how the whole alphabet settled into shape.
The late arrivals at a glance
Here are the late arrivals at a glance, before we get into the details:
| Letter | Grew out of | When it became distinct | The giveaway |
|---|---|---|---|
| J | A decorative form of I | Proposed in 1524; settled in English over the 1600s and 1700s | The 1611 King James Bible prints “Iesus” |
| U | The rounded form of V | Over the same period as J | Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary still files U and V words together |
| W | Two Us written together | Brought back by Norman scribes in the 11th century | Its name is still “double U” |
J began as a fancy way of writing I
The Romans had no J. Latin used I for both a vowel sound and a consonant sound, and nobody spelled out the difference until much later.
Medieval scribes added a twist, literally. They developed a version of i with a curved tail, used especially at the end of a word or a number. In Roman numerals, the last i in a run often got a tail, so 23 could appear as “xxiij”, as Wikipedia’s history of the letter J explains.
Some articles claim J started life as a Roman numeral. It didn’t. The tail was just a flourish. But that flourish created the shape that would later become a letter of its own.
The Italian who gave J its independence
The big change came during the Renaissance. In 1524, Italian scholar Gian Giorgio Trissino published a proposal to reform the Italian alphabet. In it, he became the first to explicitly treat I and J as standing for separate sounds.
It didn’t change every alphabet overnight. Different languages and printers adopted the idea at different times, and gave J different sounds. In English, it eventually settled on the sound in “jam”, the same as the soft G in “general”.
English took its time
English was slow to make the switch, which is why old books can look so odd today.
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was first printed in 1597 as Romeo and Iuliet. The 1611 King James Bible spelled Jesus as “Iesus”. As Laridian’s look at the first edition explains, I and J were still the same letter then. When printers wanted the consonant sound, they gave the I a hook at the bottom.
So the J shape wasn’t unknown in 1611. English just hadn’t settled into the system we use now. That’s really the heart of this story: a letter shape existing isn’t the same as a letter being treated as its own part of the alphabet.
The old arrangement lasted surprisingly late. In 1755, Samuel Johnson’s hugely influential Dictionary of the English Language still filed I and J words together, as two forms of the same letter. More than 200 years after Trissino, one of Britain’s most important dictionaries still didn’t use the 26-letter alphabet we learn at school.
U was splitting from V at the same time
This is where the popular answer gets a little too neat.
J wasn’t alone. Latin used V for both a vowel and a consonant, just as it did with I, and over time a rounded form developed. U separated from V over the same centuries that J separated from I. The same 1611 Bible printed the consonant sound as “u” in the middle of words, in spellings like “haue” for “have”.
That’s why Johnson grouped U and V together in exactly the same way he grouped I and J. J usually gets the credit as the last letter added, but U was right there beside it.
W took a different road entirely
W has an even stranger history, and it arrived much earlier.
Latin had no letter for the w sound, so in the 7th century, early Old English writers spelled it “uu”. In the 8th century, they switched to a borrowed rune called wynn (ƿ). Then, in the 11th century, Norman scribes brought back the joined double-u, according to Grammarphobia, citing the Oxford English Dictionary. Over the following centuries, it pushed wynn out of use.
Its name is a fossil of that history. We still call it “double U”, even though the printed shape looks more like two Vs.
The alphabet once had 27 characters
One more surprise. For a time, English schoolchildren recited an extra character at the end of the alphabet: the ampersand, &.
It’s a joined-up way of writing the Latin “et”, meaning “and”. Pupils finished the alphabet with “and per se and”, roughly “and, by itself, and”. Said quickly, that phrase slurred into the word “ampersand”, as Wikipedia’s ampersand article explains.
It was never a letter in the same sense as A or B. But for a while, many children learned an alphabet 27 characters long. The alphabet has lost characters as well as gained them, a story I tell in my post on the missing letters of the alphabet.
So was J really the last letter added?
Yes, with a qualification. J is generally described as the last letter added to the modern English alphabet, but that makes it sound as if someone slotted it in one day.
In reality, J grew out of I, U grew out of V at around the same time, and W had already found its own path centuries earlier. Even in 1755, Johnson was still grouping I with J and U with V. There was no single moment when the alphabet was declared complete. It settled into shape gradually, as scribes, printers, scholars and writers separated characters that had once done more than one job.
That’s why the alphabet feels ancient and permanent, even though its 26-letter form is only a few hundred years old. It took shape around the same time English was gaining thousands of new words, as I found looking into the words Shakespeare supposedly invented.
Next time you write a J, you’re using a character that began as a flourish on another letter, and spent centuries waiting to become its own.
Sources
- Wikipedia: J
- Laridian: Alphabetic weirdness in the 1611 King James Bible
- Grammarphobia: Double u
- Wikipedia: Ampersand