ACROPHONY/æˈkrɒfənɪ/
The use of a word starting with a letter of the alphabet as the name of the letter.
We don’t do this in English, as the names of our letters of the alphabet are just invented words that convey the sound indicated by the letter. But in some languages the names of letters are words that have a meaning of their own. The best-known cases are Classical Greek and Hebrew. In Hebrew, for example, the first four letters of the alphabet are aleph, which is also the Hebrew word for ox, beth, “house”, gimel, “camel”, and daleth, “door”. It’s as though our children’s alphabet, A for Apple, B for Ball, C for Cat, were transformed into the actual names for the letters, so that A wouldn’t be called or said ay, but apple. It used to be thought this wasn’t a coincidence, that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet had evolved from hieroglyphs that pictured the objects; as the hieroglyphs had evolved into letters, the names had been carried over with them. This is now not thought to be the case. The word combines the Greek prefix acro– meaning “uppermost; head”, with –phony, “sound”, hence “the sound of the initial letter”.
