Why Q Needs U

by Danny Bate

Every single one of the letters you're reading right now can tell a fascinating story, having been on a long linguistic, historical, political and social journey to reach this very page.

The English alphabet is a tool that we've inherited down the centuries from ancient creators around the world. The alphabet hasn't always had its present form, but rather has undergone all sorts of changes and evolutions to suit the needs of the time. Did you know that five English letters come from a single graphic grandparent? Or that we may know the specific person who invented the letter G? Do you know why Z is the sixth letter for the Greeks, yet the last for us? Or why Q needs to be followed by U?

Why Q Needs You takes readers on a journey through the English alphabet, not just to share fun facts, but to reveal the alphabet's hidden mechanisms and inspire a newfound sense of wonder in this ancient tool. It will not only leave the reader amazed by the letters they use every day but equipped to spot connections in languages across the world. It also aims to explain and defend the peculiar way English today uses these ancient symbols. Why does a silent final E turn hop into hope? Why are the Cs in circus pronounced differently? And why is there an L in salmon and a K in know?

Each chapter in Why Q Needs U is a self-contained adventure into history, etymology, politics and more, but will also contribute to a general appreciation for how our alphabet developed, how it has changed, and how it fits into a wider world of writing.

Genres: Nonfiction, Language, History, Linguistics, Writing, World History

Kindle Edition

Published October 2, 2025

About the author

Danny Bate is a linguist, writer, researcher and broadcaster, who holds three degrees in the field of linguistics, from BA to PhD. His specialism is language history, and this is the fuel of his public content that informs readers, listeners and viewers about humanity's incredible linguistic talents. His debut book, 'Why Q Needs U', was released in the UK in October 2025, and was hailed by Sir Stephen Fry as a "wonderful achievement".

Reviews

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book and could not put it down. I am thankful that the demands of the week allowed me to push through to the end.

This book is a history of the English Alphabet. Why the 26 letters? Why their particular order? Why do the letters look as they do? By what processes did the English Alphabet assume its current form? The author is a Ph.D.linguist who knows more about alphabets that all of my family and professional colleagues together. By a quirk of nature - or good editorial support - he also writes well.

I approached this book with interest but also with caution and concern. I have worked with words my entire life and have read extensively for personal and professional reasons. I have taught my students to write papers and analyze cases for a long time. I even play “spelling bee” in the NYT every day as aggressively as I can. I love working with words and have been called a geek, even though I know of that word’s roots in traditional circus characters.

My caution and concern come from the thousands of years over which English has developed, largely with no central direction and through the efforts of millions of speakers around the world. There might be a bit more going on here than I could handle in a single volume.

There was no need for my concern. The book was a joy to read and I cannot think a book where there has been more interesting points hanging around on each than there are in this book. The book has 26 chapters and an epilogue. There is a chapter for each letter in the alphabet and they are presented in order. The story, as you might imagine, goes back to the time of ancient Egypt and progresses forward through different languages, especially Greek and Latin, and up through into the history of what became England after the fall of the Roman Empire.

I could not possibly convey how interesting each chapter was. I worried about trying to remember all the details until I realized that there would be no chance of that - there is just too much going on. Everyone who reads a lot and thinks about what they read will find something amazing here. I am certain I will be rereading this book.

On a lark, I set one goal for the book - to understand after reading the book why the NYT Spelling Bee game excludes the letter “S” from its daily set of seven letters. (If you play the game, you know what I am talking about - there have been a small number of exceptions to this exclusion.). Well, Dr. Bate’s book passed the test and once I finished the chapter on “S” (chapter 19), I had a better sense of all the reasons why the NYT excludes “S” from Spelling Bee.

That is all I will say here. If you love words, you may well love this book. I highly recommend it.

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Danny Bates knows his alphabetical history. Each chapter discusses a separate letter of our alphabet, running from A to Z. He purports to present a stripped-down version of history, but it seems actually quite exhaustive (and exhausting - I don't recommend trying to blitz through it. Take it one letter at a time.)

We all know that English is a devilishly difficult language for ESL people to master. There's adequate fluency, and then there's the knowledge of native speakers; we don't really notice how we understand all the strange exceptions to grammatical rules, spelling and pronunciation. This book will make you appreciate how much you know as a native speaker of English that you don't know you know.

[Matt's Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

I should probably declare a conflict of interest: Danny and I shared seven years in the same school tutor group. That said, Why Q Needs U, his impassioned homage to the English alphabet, is a marvellous read by any measure.

The book's greatest strength is its accessibility. Bate unpacks linguistic complexities with stark clarity and playful flair, never condescending to the reader. We're guided through an eventful history from the Lower Nile to Anglo-Saxon shores, anticlockwise through ancient Mediterranean civilisations. The whole way we are encouraged by our guide to make strange enunciations, as I inadvertently demonstrated on several trains.

Bate demonstrates how oddities of English spelling stem from the language's honourable promiscuity (if such a concept can be entertained). English has stolen liberally from other tongues, yet lovingly maintained their words - and letters. We cling to Q, for instance, from Latin and French, even while languages like Italian (which sound somewhat more like their spelling) have made it redundant. Much of modern English orthography owes its quirks to the Norman conquest (not conkwest), though Viking raiders and Greek retrofitting also leave marks.

Sound change, Bate reminds us, always precedes spelling - for reasons like identity and loyalty. Consider the battle between American and British English over -ize versus -ise. 'Language will always follow power and prestige,' he writes. Yet the efforts of lexicographers to reflect language as it is spoken, rather than as elites wish it to be, show how change always seeps in from the periphery. The book reveals that writing is shaped by passion, ideology, upbringing, and a smorgasbord of other forces. The conveyance of sound is sometimes barely involved. Take the schwa: that elusive ‘uh’ vowel in words like suppose and about, which most English speakers will scarcely realise exists.

Why Q Needs U is a trove of eureka moments (a Greek coinage) brought together by a foremost scholar of our language.

[procrastination and escapism]

Birthday present from my sister! Hope to read soon :)

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read (or listen) for anyone interested in linguistics - a sort of history of the English language through the alphabet. Fascinating.

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

so hard to pick a favourite letter after all of this

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audio book
Danny Bate reader and author.

What a delight!

26 chapters devoted to each of the 26 letters of our alphabet, their origins and history and uses over time and today. And they are discussed with wit and humour. Now even a language nerd like me finds 26 letters a few too many and the last 6 letters are a bit dull. But they also have interesting histories and stories.

[Elizabeth]

As heard on Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics (110: The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate)

Before there was English, or Latin, or Czech, or Hindi, there was a language that they all have in common, which we call Proto-Indo-European. Linguists have long been fascinated by the quest to get a glimpse into what Proto-Indo-European must have looked like through careful comparisons between languages we do have records for, and this very old topic is still undergoing new discoveries.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about the process of figuring out Proto-Indo-European with Dr. Danny Bate, public linguist, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is..., and author of the book Why Q Needs U. We talk about why figuring out the word order of a 5000-year-old language is harder than figuring out the sounds, and a great pop linguistics/history book we've both been reading that combines recent advances in linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence to reexamine where these ancient Proto-Indo-European folks lived: Proto by Laura Spinney. We also talk about Danny's own recent book on the history of the alphabet, featuring fun facts about C, double letters, and izzard!

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice: https://pod.link/1186056137/episode/d...
Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/8007798...

Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about celebratory days, years, decades, and more with some relationship to linguistics! We recently learned that people in the UK have been celebrating National Linguistics Day on November 26th and many lingcommers are excited about the idea of taking those celebrations international: World Linguistics Day, anyone? What we learned putting this episode together is that celebratory days take off when groups of people decide to make them happen so…let's see how many different locations around the world we can wish each other Happy World Linguistics Day from this year!

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds: https://www.patreon.com/posts/142860621

For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/8007796...
https://soundcloud.com/lingthusiasm/1...

[Kaleem · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book because I heard Dr Bate interviewed about it (and his other work) on an economist podcast, and it sounded like exactly the type of book I’d enjoy. I wish I enjoyed it more though. Unusually for me, it actually gets too into the weeds on some points, and the narrative thread gets lost/I got bored. The structure of the chapters becomes a bit monotonous/predictable and by R I was kinda wishing the book to be over. Still, I learnt a lot and I think there are good times to recommend it to someone - I can imagine it being a great source of comprehension or fun reading for school kids if you use it chapter at a time.

[Alison · Rating 3 out of 5]

A history of the alphabet, each letter at the time. Book wasn't bad, with some interesting facts and tales, though some bits a little bland in the telling. Suitable for both teens and adults.

[David Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoy listening to Dr Danny Bate's podcast, A Language I Love Is, so was excited to hear that he had a book appearing, especially as it takes on a subject that sticks out as a problem with English - the spelling.

Compared with other languages, one can make a case that English spelling is irregular, confusing, and hard to learn. Indeed, there's an old joke that English spelling is so weird that you could spell there word "fish" as "ghoti". This has always annoyed me. Yes, those letters are used in various places for sounds that could make "enough". But nobody who can read English would see them and hear that. You would pronounce those letters as something like "goatee".

But that leaves the question, why? Danny Bate sets out to explain the facts. As part of that, he works his way through the modern English alphabet, explaining where the letters came from - tracing the story back into Latin, Greek and Phoenician, and ending up with the early Semitic language speakers who adapted many of the symbols from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. (So the story goes back 3000+ years!)

As a non-linguist, it was a revelation to me just how much of what now seems to be so fixed - what could be more solid than the alphabet? - was in flux for centuries, in fact till very recently, with letters being repurposed for new sounds, dropped, reinstated, reused and spun off from one another (so, G started as C, with the little crosspiece added to form a new letter). Along the way a few were lost completely (please hold poor ð and þ in your thoughts).

The history of the letters - one per chapter - naturally draws us into an explanation of what sounds they were used for, in Greek, Latin and English Old, Middle and ModernIt is a complex picture, depending on some understanding of how the sounds for which the letters stand are each made - what the tongue and throat are doing, and how changes in that can chance pronunciations, sometimes resulting in tectonic shifts which leave their traces in systematically wrong-seeming spellings. Bate is very good at giving the reader enough to understand his point, but without turning the book into an instruction manual. (It may help in though, if you can read the book in a place where you can say the sounds out loud.)

The story reminded me, somewhat, of archeology or geology, a process of unearthing layers of deposits giving clues to speech and spelling. For English, that means repeated outside influences from Norse, Norman French, Latin, the invention of printing and centuries of social and political change. These resulted in consistent patterns which can still be traced in modern spellings (though every rule has an exception, as do many of the exceptions). It's a fascinating story and the conclusions are often deeply satisfying as some apparent anomaly becomes clear.

If I've made all that sound terribly dry, it's not. This is a fun book with some amazing facts hidden away. After reading it you will, for example, know more about some of the hieroglyphs you may see on Only Connect. Why Q Needs U would make an excellent Christmas present for any word nerds in the family, as well as potentially helping settle family arguments, if your family is prone to argue about things like "s" or "z" spellings or why "W" sounds like "double U".

Or, indeed, why Q needs U at all.

Strongly recommended.