We speak English, Portuguese and French at home, and learning the alphabet can be tricky when it gets to letter examples: “G as in Grapefruit”, but that’s Pamplemousse in French and Toranja in Portuguese, so the correspondence doesn’t work in other languages and can lead to confusion.

Building a trilingual alphabet

My goal was to build a small dictionary where each letter is assigned a concept that:

• is understandable by a toddler (not “Q as in Quantum”)
• can be illustrated easily (not “W as in World Wide Web”)
• is referenced by a word starting by the same letter in all 3 languages (not “Apple/Pomme/Maçã”)

I used LLMs to get started with an initial list, but with my constraints, LLMs weren’t great at this and hallucinated a lot. I ended up mostly relying on online dictionaries, kids books we had hanging around, and home knowledge to assemble a list I liked.

While most letters had very obvious kid friendly examples, a few gave me some trouble, and one (W) proved impossible to satisfy without copyright bending.

These two charts illustrate the language differences, and the challenge I faced. They are based on word counts from the hunspell dictionaries using this script.

The hunspell pt_BR dictionary is impressively large (likely just due different choices made by the maintainers rather than some linguistic fact), but that only makes the 54 K words, 32 W words and 22 Y words all the more striking.

K,W,Y

K, W, and Y were absent from the official Portuguese alphabet until the 2000s. As a result, hardly any word exist with these letters. A Brazilian children’s book we have at home gives “Windsurf” (“planche à voile” in French, not a usable in our case), “Yakisoba” (not a simple visual concept) for these letters.

Common examples of K-words existing in English and French were adapted to use letters from the Portuguese alphabet: Kayak is Caiaque, Kangaroo is Canguru and Koala is Coala. I settled for Kiwi, but even that is commonly spelt with a Q, especially the bird.

French barely has words in Y either, doubling the challenge. Yak is usually my go-to Y-word, but uses an I in Portuguese. I settled on Yoga which seems acceptable as Ioga and Yoga in Portuguese.

W is entirely impossible. Despite Claude Sonnet’s attempts at convincing me Wombat/Vombat started with a W in Portuguese, I had to resort to the proper noun and disney/pixar IP “Wall-E” which allowed for a cuter illustration than WiFi, or Web (as in World Wide Web).

U

U was simple because Ukulele is a very common example in all 3 languages, but I was surprised to realize how few are the French words beginning with U, and how few alternatives I would have had to Ukulele.

Q

Qs in English, French and Portuguese, usually come from latin words, where the /k/ sound is already mostly handled by the letter C. Qs usually come in the qu form. This leads to a pretty small sample. I ended using Quetzal, a clear exception from this latin tendency, but a visual and colorful one.

Generating a visual

I used Gemini to generate a visual based on this list. It took a few rounds and iterations, switching between gemini-3-pro-image-preview and gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview.

The version I retained was a result of gemini-3-pro-image-preview and the following prompt:

Letter,English,French,Portuguese
A,Astronaut,Astronaute,Astronauta
B,Banana,Banane,Banana
C,Crocodile,Crocodile,Crocodilo
D,Dinosaur,Dinosaure,Dinossauro
E,Elephant,Éléphant,Elefante
F,Flower,Fleur,Flor
G,Gorilla,Gorille,Gorila
H,Helicopter,Hélicoptère,Helicóptero
I,Iguana,Iguane,Iguana
J,Jaguar
K,Kiwi
L,Lion,Lion,Leão
M,Melon,Melon,Melão
N,Narwhal,Narval,Narval
O,Orca,Orque,Orca
P,Panda
Q,Quetzal
R,Rhinoceros,Rhinocéros,Rinoceronte
S,Snake,Serpent,Serpente
T,Tiger,Tigre,Tigre
U,Ukulele
V,Volcano,Volcan,Vulcão
W,Wall-E
X,Xylophone,Xylophone,Xilofone
Y,Yoga
Z,Zebra,Zèbre,Zebra

Printing

In the US, UPS, FedEx, etc offer printing services that seem adequate for this use. I picked Vistaprint, because their upload and editing tools made it very easy to adapt my image to their constraints (other vendors have similar tools. I just liked Vistaprint’s better after very brief testing).

I chose the “Custom Poster” 11"x17" option, Vertical, with semi-gloss lamination.

Bloopers

A few examples of the text hallucinations LLMs (Sonnet 4.6 in this specific case) insisted made sense:

Letter,English,French,Portuguese
A,Ant,Fourmi,Formiga
D,Duck,Canard,Pato
K,Kangaroo,Kangourou,Canguru
Q,Quail,Caille,Codorniz
U,Urchin (sea),Oursin,Ouriço
V,Vulture,Vautour,Urubu

And some image generation goofs from gemini (3-pro and 3.1 flash):

Conclusion

With shipping, hanging strips, taxes and adding the $4.27 I spent on the Gemini API during image iterations, the entire project cost around $35.

The physical result is of good dimensions and decent printing quality. I expected the poster to be more rigid / resistant, and less prone to bending marks from the travel. Framing it might be necessary to protect it better from touching.