A-ZZZZ

A glossary of identical-letter abbreviations

Originally developed in 2004 as a student project, A-ZZZZ is an experimental web glossary documenting identical-letter abbreviations: abbreviations composed of the same repeated letter, from familiar forms like AA and WWW to more obscure entries.

The project began as a scraping and mapping exercise, collecting known identical-letter abbreviations from across the web and organizing them into a structured alphabetical system. Each entry links outward to its source or reference, turning the page into both a glossary and a navigational index.

Rather than treating abbreviations as fixed linguistic objects, A-ZZZZ presents them as a typographic pattern: a compressed visual language where meaning is produced through repetition, context, and convention. The result is part reference tool, part web experiment, and part study of how even the simplest letterforms can accumulate many different meanings.

A-ZZZZ reflects an early interest in systems, classification, typography, and the web as a space for playful knowledge structures.