Crosswords for Beginners: Meet the Letter N

You have met A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L and M. Now it's time for the alveolar (and sometimes velar) nasal,better known as N.

Nice to meet you, N. The posers of Crosswords have many ways to indicate that you are in an answer, from NORTH and NOTE…… to NORSE and NOUN. And, what's new? I am!

Noted. Now you're a bit of a snake, aren't you? Charming. Surely you're not thinking of S? You just have to look at the shape of...

No, I'm pretty sure S started out as a tooth pictograph and you were once a serpentine hieroglyph. Maybe, yeah, but I went straight, you know?

Did you, though? You're usually named as the sixth most frequently seen letter in English……far ahead of my cousin M…

…but that's because there are so many words ending in "ing". Not to mention all that "an" and "et". You just kind of...slipped in. You make me look scary. I'm pretty benign, you know?

Since you mention "benign" and "know": if a solver has the letters B___G_ or K_O_, they can reasonably expect a G sound in the former and a K in the latter. But No. Those other letters are silenced. By you. And in KNIGHT. Which also tells me in a crossword because in chess notation, K is king. But, unlike, say, E, in pretty much every word that tells me starts with the letter you'd expect NORWAY, from car stickers; NOVEMBER from the NATO alphabet; NEUTRAL from gear sticks.

< p class="dcr-3 jlghf">And, from science, NITROGEN, NEWTON and NUCLEAR. Like I said, I went straight. MARINE, NEPHEW, NOON. Should I continue? You know what you are getting.

Not in my experience. I may know what is next to you: you are normally preceded by a vowel, and followed by a D or a T. But, yourself, N: your very NAME (in math) stands for UNSPECIFIED NUMBER. As I say: you are crazy. I didn't come here to get the third degree just about the nth degree. Done!

Night, night, N. Nice to meet you.

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