520 Things That Start With Y With Pictures

Y is the rarest first letter in English after Q, X and Z, which is why most people stall after yo-yo and yellow. The letter runs much deeper than that.

Things that start with Y reach from a Mongolian tent to a Swedish quarry village that gave the periodic table four elements. Some sit on your kitchen shelf and some sit on the other side of the world.

The everyday ones come first, and the rest follow by category.

Common Things That Start With Y

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The most common things that start with Y are the yo-yo, yarn, yacht, yak, yam, yogurt, yard, yolk, yurt, yew, yeast and yield. Beyond those twelve the letter opens into food, places, science, brands and myth, with more than 500 real Y names across every category.

Twelve of these come up before any of the others. Each earns its place through something you already recognise, which makes them the quickest way into the letter.

• Yo-yo: two discs, an axle and a string, and the design turns up in Greek art from 500 BC.
• Yarn: spun fibre wound into a ball or skein, ready for knitting or weaving.
• Yacht: pleasure boat rather than a working one, sail or motor.
• Yak: long-haired ox of the Himalaya, kept for milk, wool and haulage above 4,000 metres.
• Yam: starchy tuber from Africa and Asia, and not the same plant as a sweet potato despite American shop labels.
• Yogurt: milk fermented by bacteria.
• Yard: either the ground around a house or the imperial measure of three feet.
• Yolk: the yellow centre of an egg, which feeds the developing chick.
• Yurt: round felt tent on a collapsible lattice frame, still lived in across Mongolia and Central Asia today.
• Yew: dark evergreen that survives for thousands of years, and every part of it except the red aril is poisonous.
• Yeast: a single-celled fungus that turns sugar into carbon dioxide, which is what lifts bread and ferments beer.
• Yield: as a noun it means the amount produced, and as a road sign it tells you to give way.

Objects That Start With Y

45 everyday objects begin with Y once you stop counting colours. A yardarm is the crossbeam on a mast, a yarder is the winch that drags logs uphill, and a Yankee screwdriver drives itself when you push it.

Household Items That Start With Y

40 household things begin with Y, and most of them live in the kitchen, the garden or the craft basket.

Foods That Start With Y

51 foods begin with Y, spanning West African stew, Japanese confectionery and a Sunday roast. For the full treatment of the edible ones, see foods that start with Y.

Animals That Start With Y

48 animals begin with Y. The yeti is on no list here, because no specimen has ever been documented, which makes it a legend rather than a species.

Clothes That Start With Y

25 garments and accessories begin with Y, and several of them come from outside English entirely.

• Yashmak: a face veil worn by some Muslim women, covering everything below the eyes.
• Yukata: unlined cotton kimono for summer festivals and hot springs, tied with a narrow obi.
• Yarmulke: skullcap worn by Jewish men, also called a kippah.
• Y-fronts: men’s briefs named for the Y-shaped seam at the front.
• Yoke: the shaped panel across the shoulders of a shirt or the hips of a skirt, which is what makes the fabric hang.
• Yachting cap: peaked white cap of the sailing club.
• Yak wool: warmer than merino by weight, softer than it looks, and gathered by combing rather than shearing.
• Yashmagh: checked headscarf of Iraq and the Gulf, folded and held with a cord.

Plants And Nature Things With Y

41 plants and natural features begin with Y. Ylang-ylang supplies the top note in Chanel No. 5. Yaupon holly is the only caffeinated plant native to North America.

Places That Start With Y

65 places begin with Y, and only one of them is a sovereign country. Yemen stands alone there, since Yugoslavia dissolved between 1992 and 2006 and no longer exists on any map.

Sports And Activities With Y

20 sports and pastimes begin with Y. Yabusame is mounted archery in Japan, yukigassen is competitive snowball fighting, and yagli gures is Turkish oil wrestling.

Things In Space That Start With Y

15 things in space begin with Y. The Sun counts as a yellow dwarf, though the label misleads. A G-type main-sequence star emits white light, and only the atmosphere makes it look yellow from the ground.

Science Words That Start With Y

34 science terms begin with Y, and four of them trace back to one village.

• Yttrium: element 39, named after Ytterby in Sweden, and used in the phosphors that make a screen glow red on almost every television.
• Ytterbium: from the same Swedish village, element 70 now runs the most accurate atomic clocks built.
• Y-chromosome: sex chromosome carrying the male-determining gene in mammals.
• Yolk sac: the first blood-forming organ in a vertebrate embryo.
• Young’s modulus: how stiff a material is, measured as stress divided by strain.
• Yaw: rotation about the vertical axis.
• Yottabyte: a trillion terabytes, and the largest standard unit currently named.
• Yersinia: bacterial genus behind plague, which killed about a third of Europe in the 1340s.

Ytterby is a quarry village on an island near Stockholm, and four elements carry its name: yttrium, ytterbium, terbium and erbium. Nine elements in total were first identified in rock from that one quarry, which closed in 1933 after 177 years of digging. No other place on earth has given the periodic table more.

Musical Instruments That Start With Y

20 instruments begin with Y, and almost every one of them comes from Asia.

• Yangqin: the Chinese hammered dulcimer, played with two flexible bamboo beaters.
• Yueqin: moon-shaped lute with a short neck, heard in Peking opera.
• Yatga: Mongolian zither with movable bridges.
• Yun-lo: rack of small tuned gongs, struck with a light mallet.
• Yidaki: what the Yolngu of Arnhem Land call the instrument outsiders know as the didgeridoo, and the name matters to them.
• Yehu: a two-string Chinese fiddle with a coconut-shell body.
• Yotsudake: four bamboo clappers held two to a hand in Okinawan dance.
• Yazh: an ancient Tamil harp, carved with an animal head at the neck.

Brands That Start With Y

31 brands and companies begin with Y. Yamaha builds pianos and motorbikes under one name, which almost no other company manages. It started in 1887 making reed organs.

Mythology And History Things With Y

30 figures and events from myth and history begin with Y.

• Yggdrasil: world tree of Norse myth, an ash whose roots reach three separate wells.
• Ymir: the first giant, killed by Odin and his brothers, who built the world from his body and the sea from his blood.
• Yama: god of death in Hindu and Buddhist tradition, and the first mortal to die.
• Yaksha: nature spirits of Indian myth, benign in most stories and dangerous in the rest.
• Yule: midwinter festival that Christmas absorbed, and the source of the yule log.
• Yellow Emperor: legendary founder of Chinese civilisation, credited with writing, medicine and the compass.
• Yeoman Warder: guardian of the Tower since 1485.
• Yara-ma-yha-who: a small red figure from Aboriginal Australian story that swallows people whole and brings them back changed.

Expensive Things That Start With Y

18 genuinely expensive things begin with Y, and the gap between the cheapest and the dearest runs into eight figures.

• Yacht: a 30-metre superyacht runs into tens of millions before crew, berth and fuel.
• Yellow diamond: intense yellow stones sell for more per carat than colourless ones of the same size, and the Graff Vivid Yellow set the record.
• Yellow sapphire: Ceylon stones command the highest prices, and Vedic astrology drives much of that demand.
• Yves Saint Laurent handbag: four figures new.
• Yixing teapot: unglazed purple clay from one Chinese county, and antique pots reach six figures at auction.
• Yamaha grand piano: concert CFX models cost about as much as a small house.
• Yak wool cashmere: finer than most goat cashmere and produced in a fraction of the volume.
• Yearling racehorse: untested and unraced, and the record price at auction passed sixteen million dollars.

Seasonal Things That Start With Y

29 seasonal and holiday things begin with Y, across three parts of the year.

Winter and Christmas. The yule log came first as a real log burned through midwinter, then became the rolled chocolate cake. Yule wreaths, yule candles, yule goats and yuletide markets all descend from the same festival.

Halloween and autumn. Yeti costumes, yard skeletons, yard inflatables and yarn dolls carry the letter through October, and yam casserole and yam pie carry it into Thanksgiving.

Weddings and spring. Yellow tulip and yellow rose bouquets, yellow ribbon, yellow bunting and yuzu marmalade favours all turn up on the spring side of the year.

Things In Spanish That Start With Y

18 Spanish nouns begin with Y, and several of them look nothing like their English meanings. Yema is an egg yolk, yeso is plaster, yunque is an anvil and yerno is a son-in-law.

How To Pronounce Y Words

Y is the only letter in English that regularly works as both a consonant and a vowel. That is why it makes three different sounds depending on its position in a word.

Several Y names also break the pattern people expect. Yttrium opens on a short I rather than a Y sound, so it begins like itch. Ylang-ylang runs EE-lang-EE-lang. And yueqin comes out closer to yweh-CHIN than to anything the spelling suggests.

The same trouble turns up wherever a letter borrows from other languages, which is why things that start with E catches people out on epaulette and escritoire.

Phonics Words That Start With Y

Teachers work the three Y sounds separately, because a child who learns only the consonant sound stalls the first time they meet happy.

Consonant Y at the start. Yak, yam, yard, yarn, yawn, year, yell, yellow, yes, yet, yoga, yogurt, yolk, you, young, your, yo-yo, yuck, yummy, yurt.

Y as long E at the end. Baby, bunny, candy, funny, happy, jelly, lolly, penny, puppy, silly, sticky, sunny, tiny, tummy, windy.

Y as long I at the end. By, cry, dry, fly, fry, my, pry, shy, sky, sly, spy, try, why.

Things That Start With Y For Kids

Younger children learn the letter fastest through things they can pick up or picture at once. These eight work for show and tell, phonics practice and letter-of-the-week alike.

• Yo-yo: it goes down the string and comes back up.
• Yak: a big hairy cow from the mountains.
• Yarn: soft string you knit a jumper from.
• Yogurt: comes in a pot and tastes a bit sour.
• Yolk: yellow bit inside an egg.
• Yacht: boat with big white sails.
• Yawn: what your mouth does when you are sleepy, and it spreads to anyone watching you do it.
• Yellow: the colour of a banana, a lemon, a school bus and the middle of a daisy, all of them at once.

Say each name out loud and press the Y at the front. Yo-yo and yak land easiest, since both are short and both name something a child can pick up.

FAQs

Q1. What things start with the letter Y?

The yo-yo, yarn, yacht, yak, yam, yogurt, yard and yolk are the eight most people name first. Beyond those, more than 500 real things begin with Y across food, animals, places, science, brands and myth. Only one sovereign country joins them, and that is Yemen.

Q2. What object starts with a Y?

A yo-yo is the object most people reach first, followed by a yardstick, a yearbook and a yacht. Less obvious ones include the yardarm on a ship’s mast, the yoke across the shoulders of a shirt, and the yarder winch that hauls logs uphill. All name real objects rather than colour descriptions.

Q3. What school items start with Y?

Yearbooks, yardsticks and yellow highlighters are the school items that start with Y. Younger classrooms add yarn for craft work, yoga mats for movement sessions and Yahtzee for number practice. Y offers little on stationery, which is why teachers fall back on yarn.

Q4. What is something in nature that starts with Y?

The yew tree is the best-known natural thing starting with Y, and some British yews are over two thousand years old. Yucca, yarrow, ylang-ylang and yaupon holly fill out the common plants. Larger features include Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Yangtze and the Yellow Sea.

Q5. What toy starts with Y?

The yo-yo is the toy that starts with Y, and it ranks among the oldest toys still in production. For board games Yahtzee answers, a yak figurine for animal toys, and yarn craft kits for making things. Yoda and Yoshi add the character toys most children name.

Q6. What are household items that start with Y?

Yogurt makers, yolk separators, yardsticks and yarn baskets are the household items that start with Y. The garden adds yard rakes, yard hoses and yard benches. Yoga mats, yoga blocks and yoga straps make up most of the rest, since Y is a thin letter indoors.

Q7. Does Y always make the same sound?

No, Y makes three different sounds. At the start of a word it works as a consonant, as in yellow and yak. At the end of a longer word it says long E, as in happy. At the end of a short word it says long I, as in sky.

Q8. What expensive things start with Y?

A yacht is the most expensive thing starting with Y, since a 30-metre superyacht runs into tens of millions before running costs. Yellow diamonds and yellow sapphires lead on price per carat. Antique Yixing teapots, Yamaha concert grands and yearling racehorses fill out the rest.

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