He had helped Murray with the very firstentry in the Dictionary – A: not only the sound A, ‘the low-back-wide vowelformed with the widest opening of the jaws, pharynx, and lips’, but also themusical sense of A, ‘the 6th note of the diatonic scale of C major’, and finallythe algebraic sense of A, ‘as in a, b, c, early letters of the alphabet used toexpress known quantities, as x, y, z are to express the unknown’. Ellis washappy to see these and other results of his work on the printed page, includingthe words air, alert, algebra.