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…

P leans harder on Latin than almost any other letter. 82 of the 278 adjectives below begin pre-, pro- or per- — not all of them from the Latin prefixes meaning before, forward and through, since pretty is Germanic and protean is Greek, but most. That is why the letter holds so many near-neighbours a…

H runs to compounds. 18 of the 140 adjectives below are hyphenated, and 8 of those are built on a body part or the mind — hard-headed, heavy-handed, high-minded, hot-headed, half-hearted, hard-nosed. English reaches for that construction when it wants to name a trait of character in one word, and this letter carries a good…

F has an unusual number of ways to call someone silly. 7 of the 142 adjectives below describe a person who has got it wrong — fanciful, fatuous, flighty, flippant, foolhardy, foolish and frivolous — and each names a different fault. That is worth having: most of the time a writer reaches for silly and…

K is one of the smallest letters in English, and a striking share of what it has sits in one cluster: 17 of the 40 adjectives below begin kn-, a spelling that preserves a k dropped from standard English pronunciation during the seventeenth century — though the cluster survives in some Scots dialects, and was…

J is a small letter with two unexpected concentrations. Eight of the words below mean some form of cheerful — jolly, jovial, jocular, jocose, jocund, jubilant, joyful, joyous — and another 8 come from the Latin words for law and judgement. That is sixteen of the letter from two ideas; the rest scatter, and the…