Talking about film and music

La letra is a letter of the alphabet, and it is also the words of a song: la letra dice más que la música. The same noun is somebody's handwriting — tienes buena letra — and, in the plural with a capital, the humanities: Filosofía y Letras. English needs four words and none of them overlaps. The thread running through is what is written rather than sounded, which is why a song's words are la letra even when nobody has written them down. Two turns of phrase come free: al pie de la letra is to the letter, and la letra pequeña is the small print.