Which letter is not in any U.S. state name?
Quick answer
Q is the only letter of the alphabet that doesn’t appear in any of the 50 U.S. state names. Other rare letters do show up at least once: J in New Jersey, Z in Arizona, and X in Texas and New Mexico. Every other letter appears in at least one state.
Where the rare letters hide
| Letter | States containing it |
|---|---|
| J | New Jersey (only one) |
| Z | Arizona (only one) |
| X | Texas, New Mexico |
| K | Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota |
| Q | None |
Washington, D.C. isn’t a state, and doesn’t contain a Q either. Some US cities do contain a Q, such as Albuquerque, New Mexico.
More state name trivia
- Longest name: Massachusetts and the Carolinas (North and South) have 13 letters each, counting letters only.
- Shortest names: Iowa, Ohio and Utah, with 4 letters each.
- One syllable: only Maine; see which US state has a one-syllable name.
- Shared first letter: M and N each begin eight state names, more than any other letters.
- Most-used vowel pattern: Alabama uses the vowel “a” four times and no other vowel.
State names and their origins
Roughly half of US state names come from Native American languages, including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio and Utah. Others come from Spanish (Florida, Nevada, Colorado), French (Vermont, Louisiana), English monarchs (Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas) and Latin.
Q is rare in English too
Q is one of the least used letters in English, along with Z, X and J. It’s almost always followed by U, with exceptions mostly borrowed from other languages, like Qatar and qi.
For more American geography, see where the geographic center of the US is.
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