One more game that can be played with the numerical values of the alphabet is to search for words that total a specific value-the holy grail of which is precisely 100.
The letters in FOURTEEN DOZEN add up to 14 dozen (168). Add up the neighboring letter pairs in CAN (3 + 1, 1 + 14), and you’ll get DO (4, 15). Likewise, WHITE (65) plus HOUSE (68) equals GOVERNMENT (133). So add the value of ARM (32) to the value of BEND (25) and you get the value of ELBOW (57). Assigning numbers to letters-A = 1, B =2, C = 3, and so on, all the way through to Z = 26-opens the alphabet up to all kinds of mathematical and numerical games and trivia. Besides anagrams and palindromes, if there’s one thing wordplay aficionados like to mess around with, it’s the numerical value of the letters of the alphabet.
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