Alphabet Pictures

Sometimes you need to remember alphabet letters, for example in license plate numbers and in spelling problem words.

For these memory problems, you need picturable equivalents for alphabet letters.

I try to make the picturable equivalent for each letter as close to the name of the letter as possible.

Here are the ones I use:

A: ape
B: bee
C: sea
D: Dee (nickname for my friend Domenique)
E: hee (a giggler)
F: Hef (Hugh Hefner)
G: gee (gravity)
H: itch
I: eye
J: jay
K: Kay (another friend)
L: el (elevated train)
M: hem (a dress)
N: hen
O: eau (a bottle of perfume)
P: pea
Q: cue (pool cue)
R: are (pronounced like "r"; one hundredth of a hectare)
S: ess (an ess curve, which I imagine as a whip)
T: tea
U: ewe (female sheep)
V: Mr. V (a friend's expression for any buff male)
W: a double ewe (Siamese twin ewes)
X: eggs
Y: "Y" (the YMCA building)
Z: zee (a Z-shaped sea held in by Dutch dikes)

Using the Link with the Phonetic Alphabet

If you have a number, such as a phone number, you can transform it into a picturable equivalent using the phonetic alphabet described two posts back. You turn the number into an image or a series of images, then link them. The first item in the link should be a picturable equivalent of the person whose phone number you wish to recall. The picturable equivalent for the person can be a feature of the person's appearance or some version or part of the person's name.

For example, Mr. Szewczyk's phone number is 800 555-1202. His name is pronounced "chef-chick." One way to make a picturable equivalent of his name is to use a baby chick wearing a chef's hat as your standard image for Szewczyk. (Another would be to use the dimple in his chin or other physical characteristic as your standard "anchor" for him.)

Using the chick as the standard for Mr. Szewczyk, I link it to "faces," which represents 800 (the "f" sounds and two "s" sounds). I imagine the "chef-chick" cooking a lot of faces like pancakes, flipping them from a griddle.

To link 800 ("faces") to "lily whale" (555), I imagine hundreds of faces kissing a whale smoking a big lily.

To link "lily whale" to "tan Sony," I imagine the "lily whale" shining a tanning light on a Sony boom box, that is, giving a "tan" to a Sony.

More on basic association: the Link

I can imagine myself putting hamburger patties on my buns. That gets me to buns.

Then I imagine the two halves of a bun with lots of tissues between them, a kind of tissue sandwich. That gets me to tissues.

Then I can imagine a big living tissue drinking lemonade, which makes the tissue all sopping wet. That gets me to lemonade.

Then I imagine hundreds of tiny pitchers of lemonade flying like kamikazes through a giant potato chip, punching holes in the chip. This gets me to potato chips.

Then I imagine a big chip with little green broccoli growing all over it like measles. That gets me to broccoli.

Then I imagine myself pouring ketchup over head after head of broccoli. This gets me to ketchup, the last item.

If it's important to know that broccoli ends the list, I can imagine a giant head of broccoli going down like the sun below the horizon.

Now I know the list backwards and forwards. Ketchup makes me think of broccoli, broccoli of potato chips, potato chips of lemonade, lemonade of tissues, tissues of buns, buns of hamburger, hamburger of grocery store.