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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Numbers, post: 577562, member: 11668&quot;]The large-size block alphabet is...strange.&nbsp; I&#039;ve never seen an explanation of how they decided which letters to include and which to skip.&nbsp; Indeed, they weren&#039;t even consistent themselves over time.&nbsp; The approximately &quot;standard&quot; alphabet was</p><p><br /></p><p>A B D E H K M N R T V X Y Z</p><p><br /></p><p>but there were variations--those Black Eagles have a U..U block, even though earlier they didn&#039;t use a U block, and later they didn&#039;t use a U..A block.</p><p><br /></p><p>Some of the Nationals, which I still don&#039;t have on the website, are even odder; they occasionally skipped a letter like M or T and then tacked it on at the end after the Z block.&nbsp; The 1882 gold certificates *did* use a C block, but skipped B instead for no apparent reason.</p><p><br /></p><p>The earliest notes with block letters apparently chose them entirely at random (perhaps to confuse counterfeiters?).&nbsp; The 1869 $1&#039;s have five serial blocks, which in order are B, Z, V, K, and A.&nbsp; Other denominations used unrelated sequences.&nbsp; Maybe later when the BEP decided to start proceeding in alphabetical order, they just alphabetized the letters they already had without bothering to go out and get the letters they&#039;d never used before?&nbsp; No, that doesn&#039;t work either; the 1869 $100&#039;s are all W block, which doesn&#039;t seem to have been used ever again on large-size notes.</p><p><br /></p><p>When the FRNs came along in 1914, every letter from A to L came into use as a prefix, but even then the suffixes were still pulled from the shortened alphabet: the New York $5&#039;s rolled over from B..B to B..D, with no B..C block.</p><p><br /></p><p>The small-size notes, beginning with Series 1928, introduced the 25-letter alphabet using every letter except O.&nbsp; That was standard until the &#039;60s when everything but FRNs went out of production; at that point, the BEP seems to have discarded its supply of letters above L.&nbsp; At least, the <a href="http://www.uspapermoney.info/serials/f1977as.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.uspapermoney.info/serials/f1977as.html" rel="nofollow">1977A $1&#039;s</a> on New York had to roll over from B..L back to B..A, since there apparently weren&#039;t any M&#039;s available any more.&nbsp; And in the <a href="http://www.uspapermoney.info/serials/f1985_s.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.uspapermoney.info/serials/f1985_s.html" rel="nofollow">1985 $1&#039;s</a>, there&#039;s a several-month production gap between the end of the L blocks and the start of the M blocks; this looks suspiciously like the BEP had to go put in an order for some new letters!&nbsp; Since then, several series have gone past the L suffix without apparent incident--but the new alphabet appears to end at Y, not Z, since the <a href="http://www.uspapermoney.info/serials/f1995_s.html" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.uspapermoney.info/serials/f1995_s.html" rel="nofollow">1995 $1&#039;s</a> hit the end of the Y block in the two largest districts, and then shifted production to other districts for the year-plus remainder of the series.</p><p><br /></p><p>As always, more than you wanted to know....&nbsp; <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie6" alt=":cool:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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