Q is a letter with a hole in the middle of it. There is a small everyday vocabulary — quick, quiet, quaint, quirky, queasy — and then almost everything else is Latin arithmetic: quadr- for four, quin- for five, quart- for a fourth part. Close to a third of this page is counting. This page…

Z is the last letter and one of the emptiest, and what it does hold splits cleanly in two. There is a small run of everyday words about energy and speed — zany, zesty, zippy, zingy — and then a long tail of Greek and Latin technical vocabulary built on zoo- for animal, zym- for…

X is the smallest letter in English, and almost everything in it arrived from Greek. Four roots carry nearly the whole letter: xero- for dry, xylo- for wood, xantho- for yellow and xeno- for foreign or strange. Learn those four and most of this page decodes itself. This page lists 26 adjectives that start with…

This is the companion to a page about describing a woman, and it is built the same way on purpose, because the two are most useful read together. The interesting fact about describing a man is not that there are many words for it. It is that some of them attach to men and not…

U is the letter where one prefix does most of the work. 109 of the 151 adjectives below begin un-, and that is the difficulty with this letter rather than a fact about it: English will let you put un- in front of almost anything, and the result is a real adjective that a dictionary…

Most lists on this subject are lists of compliments, sorted by how flattering they are. This one is sorted by what the words actually do, because the useful fact about describing a woman is not that there are many words for it — it is that some of them behave differently than they would about…

V is a small letter carrying a large amount of Latin. Of the 216 adjectives below, 67 begin vi- and 64 begin ve-, and a great many of them arrived whole from Latin roots that are still visible: vid- and vis- for seeing, voc- for calling, viv- for living, ver- for truth. That is why…

G is two letters wearing one hat. 31 of the 230 adjectives below begin gl- and 69 begin gr-, and between them they hold most of what the letter is good at: light and smoothness on the gl- side — gleaming, glossy, glassy — and roughness, weight and complaint on the gr- side, in gritty,…

W runs to compounds. 33 of the 192 adjectives below are hyphenated, and 18 of those begin well- — one of the larger such clusters in English, though not the largest: self- beats it comfortably. The construction is mostly used to praise something specific — well-read, well-founded, well-mannered each name a different kind of good…