How Many Letters in the Alphabet: Try to Solve the Viral Riddle
Updated: Apr. 17, 2024
The alphabet song won't help you in the case of this viral riddle
Social media’s newest brain game has a ton of people stumped. So stumped, in fact, that the riddle has gone viral. People are astounded by just how wrong their initial answers are, and they want to see if anybody has solved it correctly on their first try. As we know from other popular riddles, brain-teasers always make us look at things from an alternative perspective. Get those thinking caps on and warm up your brain because this “how many letters are in the alphabet” riddle is a doozy.
Ready for a challenge? Ahead, we’ll pose the riddle that has stumped the nation. Can you answer it correctly, or will you be tricked as well?
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How many letters are in the alphabet?
Be careful. The question may seem obvious, but the answer is not what you think.
At first, your initial reaction would be to say 26. After all, we have been taught since preschool, thanks to the famous alphabet song, that there are 26 letters. If you said 26, try looking at the question in a new way and see if you can come up with a different answer.
Ready for the real answer?
Alphabet riddle answer
The answer is 11. Did you get it right? If not, don’t worry: Like a lot of challenging riddles, this one was designed to trick you.
“How many letters are in the alphabet” riddle explained
You already knew the answer wasn’t 26 letters. That would be too easy. But how did we land on 11? The answer, dear readers, can be found in the question itself.
The question is this: “how many letters are in the alphabet?” In this instance, you are being asked to take the question as literally as possible by counting the letters in the words the alphabet instead of the actual alphabet itself. That’s why the answer is 11 letters, and not the full 26 we all learned in school.
But there’s another possible answer to this short riddle. If you don’t count repeats, there are only seven different letters in “the alphabet”: T, H, E, A, L, P and B. Now you see why this question catches so many people off guard. If you said seven or 11, congratulations!
How many letters are in the English alphabet?
Now that you know the trick to this kind of question, you should be able to solve this alternate version of the alphabet riddle. How many letters are in the English alphabet? That’s right: 18.
Congratulations! You’ve solved this riddle and are ready for other tricky brain teasers that will really get you thinking.
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At Reader’s Digest, we’re known for our humor and brain games, including quizzes, puzzles, riddles, word games, trivia, math, pattern and logic puzzles, guessing games, crosswords, rebus, hidden objects and spot-the-difference challenges. We’ve earned prestigious ASME awards for our entertainment content and have produced dozens of brain-teaser books, including Word Searches, Word Power, Use Your Words, Fun Puzzles and Brain Ticklers, Mind Stretchers, Ultimate Christmas Puzzles and more. Our 10 published volumes of Mind Stretchers were edited by Allen D. Bragdon, founder of The Brainwaves Center and editor of Games magazine. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
Originally Published: June 18, 2021
