Ay. Bee. Cee. Dee. Ee. Eff. Jee. Aych. Eye. Jay. Kay. El. Em. En. Oh. Pee. Kyew. Are. Ess. Tee. Yew. Vee. Dubble-yew. Ecks. Why. Zee.
Are these the official formal spellings of the letters of the English alphabet? Does such a thing exist?
I think there must be some official spelling, because I see them regularly used in crossword puzzles. I know I’ve recently seen “Aitch” and “Wye” (not why).
And Scrabble. Check out the Scrabble dictionary, or any good dictionary for that matter.
Here are some fairly standard spellings of the letters.
The official **spelling **of each letter is the letter itself. What you’re talking about is its pronunciation.
What is this Zee imposter? All users of the Queen’s English know it to be rightly Zed.
Nitpick: There are no “official” spellings of anything in English, because there’s no official academy regulating spelling, grammar, etc., in English. There’s only common usage, as recorded by scholars, and the opinion of experts on what’s better to use.
But clearly most people in the US would write and say “zee”, while most people in the rest of the English-speaking world would write and say “zed”, so there goes your common standard.
For the vowels, including Y, I think you can just write the letter, though you might want to use the homonyms “eye”, “you” and “why”. For the consonants, I’d be using these variants from the list in the OP: Gee, Aitch, Ell, Queue, Double-U, Ex.
(The “double” in the name of W is there because historically U and V are the same letter, and W originated by doubling that letter, so I don’t understand why you would want to spelling it “dubble”).
"I’m hooked on phonics, cause…!
Yeah, that’s why I was thinking (for a very long time) the American schoolkids only ever learned three letters of the alphabet (from A to Cee). How are you supposed to hear the difference in any but the most ideal acoustic surroundings?
But the letters have names; what we are talking about is the spelling of these letter names. The name of the letter ‘z’ differs between the US (zee) and UK (zed), even though the letter itself is the same.
The letters have names in other languages as well, which are different from their English names, although the letters are the same. For example, the name of ‘j’ in Spanish is jota (pronounced HO-ta); the name of ‘y’ is i griega (“Greek i”).
We get by. It hasn’t caused our meager civilization to fail yet. 
It has to do with the amount of sibilance heard at the beginning.
It also helps, of course, that ‘z’ (however one pronounces it) is relatively uncommon.
Does anyone dispute, incidentally, that “alpha” is spelled “alpha lambda phi alpha”? Or would you insist that it’s just spelled “[symbol]a[/symbol]”? It’s worth noting, incidentally, that all of the letter names start with the letter itself, unlike our “eff”, “em”, “aitch”, et cetera.
Do the spellings of eta and omicron/omega in Greek start with the letter itself?
Eta may well and simply not have been transliterted HTA because it looks so strange. Omicron and omega sound to me like they start with the same letter (I think omega).
Try figuring out “ess” and “eff” on the phone - it’s tough. I’ve heard at least that the frequency range reproduced by phones actually makes the distinction impossible to hear, although in most circumstances it’s not too confusing. In spelling out my somewhat unusual last name, though, it’s an annoyance (since it has one of each.)
The spellings of the names of letters in English seem to me a bit less standardized than most other spellings. My dictionary, at least, has multiple spellings for some of them, a fact that comes up during Scrabble games from time to time. But there are real spellings for the names, real enough to get printed in dictionaries at least.
While “aitch” does not start with an H, “haitch” does. I guess I have been around Irish folks for too long.
I can’t believe that no one has yet mentioned the great Sidney Harris cartoon (it’s actually all letters) of “The Alphabet in Alphabetical Order”. I can’t get it up on line, but here’s a transcript of it:
http://compgeom.cs.uiuc.edu/~jeffe/teaching/373/notes/06-hashing.pdf#search=‘Sidney%20Harris%20Alphabet%20in%20alphabetical’
Despite what the usually-correct Chronoc says, not all phonetic versions of the letters start with the letters themselves, which is what makes the Harris joke funny. Not only “aitch” for “H”, but also “Wye” (or “Wy” as it’s given here) for “Y” (It’s also a common spelling for “Wye = Y Networks” ion electronics, which is Wye I’m surprised Chronos missed it.)Not to mention “Double You”.
Forgot the link:
Was it only my school that taught the vowels are “a, e, i, o, u”? I had always thought that in the U.K. those were the only vowels and across the duckpond they included “y” in the list. Is this right or do most schools in the U.K. teach that “y” is a vowel?
Depending on context, Y is either a vowel or a consonant. In “yearly”, the first y is a consonant and the second y is a vowel.
(And W can be a vowel in in English, too.)
The confusion is because schools are teaching something bizarre and nonsensical. As a matter of fact, A, E, I, O, U, and Y are not vowels or consonants. They’re letters. “Vowel” and “consonant” are only meaningful descriptions when applied to sounds, and letters are not sounds - nor do they even correspond very well in English. Thus the confusion - since letters can represent several sounds, it’s no shocker that sometimes a letter might represent both vowel and consonant sounds. Y quite commonly represents the sounds /i/ and /j/, the former a vowel, and the latter a consonant (or semivowel). Misusing terminology like “vowel” and “consonant” is confusing; it doesn’t make sense at all to apply them to marks on a sheet of paper.