 Traditionally, when reciting the alphabet in English-speaking schools, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A", "I", and, at one point, "O") was repeated with the Latin expression "per se" ("by itself"), as in "A per se A".It was also common practice to add the sign at the end of the alphabet as if it were the 27th letter, pronounced as the Latin "et" or later in English as "and".As a result, the recitation of the alphabet would end in "X, Y, Z, "and per se and"".