A is for the AAA rating Ireland lost last year. The credit rating agencies, which hand out the ratings, are paid by lenders to grade government bond issues like some sort of school essay. Slipping down the grades makes borrowing more expensive and some classes of investors cannot buy anything but the high-grade debt stuff. But there is a bit of grade inflation, like in the Leaving Cert or university degrees, which means AAA is not the grade it once was. As BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders put it splendidly when referring to the UK: the sovereign, though still an AAA country, was being treated as if it had already lost its top grade.

A is also for Austerity, which may be how to turn a market debt crisis into a disaster (see E and M below)

B is for banjaxed bonds. They say countries cannot go bust because people have nowhere to go. But private collectors own Czarina Russian railway bonds and other national paper that was never repaid. One definition of a sovereign debt crisis is when citizens pay a lower mortgage rate than their government has to pay to borrow money on their behalf. Welcome to Ireland.

C is for coupon: the annual interest the government pays to foreigners who buy our IOUs at auctions. Despite soothing words from the people who issue the IOUs – in Ireland, the National Treasury Management Agency – each successive crisis has increased the cost of borrowing money for Irish taxpayers.

It's also for CCCTB, or Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base. Many in Brussels believe that harmonisation (meaning the loss of our 12.5% corporation tax rate) will be the price Ireland pays for the European bond bailout.

D is for the deutschmark. We are told that the Germans rue leaving the deutschmark to join the drachmas, pesetas and punts in the single currency. But dithering drove up the cost to German taxpayers of the Greek bailout and devalued the Greek bond debt paper that German banks hold. German manufacturers still sell Mercedes to Athens taxi drivers, BMW minis to Britons and medical equipment to the Irish.

E is for eurozone. Ireland and the other euro countries locked into an exchange rate against the deutschmark and in recent years benefited from the rise of the euro against the dollar. All EU governments, not just those of the euro, are supposed to keep their annual borrowings below 3% of their annual economic output. Unfortunately, Ireland, Britain and Greece have annual budget deficits in excess of 12%. The EU rules demand the deficits be cut below the 3% GDP ceiling by the end of 2014. Cutting deficits so quickly threatens extending recession, making it even less likely governments can repay bondholders.

F is for the Financial Times, which is becoming London's official voice of eurosceptics. "The euro has yet to prove it's worth saving", and "The euro is at the end of a long-term historic shift", its columnists opined in recent weeks. "It is too early to say the European experiment has failed," another columnist graciously conceded.

G is for gilts, which is what the British call their bonds. The rate Britain must pay to borrow money for ten years was 3.57% last week, down sharply on recent weeks as it benefited from the euro debt crisis. But the rate is still significantly higher than Belgium's 3.1% and closer to the 3.9% at which historically profligate Italy has to borrow to service its debt pile. G is also for Greece, which has replaced Iceland as our shorthand for a national financial crisis.

H is for Hungary, which was one of the first EU countries, in late 2008, to receive aid from the IMF. Hungary can borrow money for ten years at 7.1%, up sharply from 6.3% last month.

I is for Ireland. Even without the reckless bankers, Ireland would be facing a debt crisis because the economic slump here, as the IMF has pointed out, will be one of the sharpest of any advanced economy anywhere. The Department of Finance prefers to present it otherwise, but the credit ratings agencies add on the bankers' Nama loans to national debt as a so-called 'contingent liability' for Irish taxpayers. That will push the Irish debt pile next year to 118% of GDP – or about €200bn in old-fashioned money.

Meantime, Irish interest payments on a rising debt pile soared for the first four months of this year compared to last year.

I is also for Iceland. London commentators late last year were fond of writing up Dublin as Reykjavik-on-the-Liffey. The penny dropped when the New York Times last spring reported on Reykjavik-on-Thames.

J is for junk bonds or, more politely, bonds rated below investment grade. The AA– grade Fitch gives Ireland is three steps below the top AAA ranking and six grades above junk status. Greek bonds at BBB+ are three grades above junk.

K is for keeping the head down, or the Irish government's policy as the Greek debt crisis escalated. But when Athens – and now Madrid and Lisbon – promise more austerity, the KHD policy can only bring us so far.

L is for Luca Cazzulani, the sovereign debt guru at Unicredit Group in Milan. Luca said the euro debt crisis would get really serious if Spain came under attack. There's enough money to go around to bail out Greece, Portugal and Ireland. But Spain?

M is for the Maastricht treaty, the agreement reached in 1992 that ushered in the 3% deficit rule. A decade later, Germany and France played fast and loose with the ceiling. Some economists warn that reducing deficits too quickly will turn the European debt crisis into a real economic disaster.

M is also for markets, the incantation of commentators. Usually, sovereign interest rates rise during periods of economic growth, because lenders demand higher yields to compensate for higher anticipated inflation, and fall during recessions. In this crisis, sovereign interest rates have soared because lenders fear governments will default. Meanwhile stock markets have slumped on the expectation company profits will fall as governments cut back spending. Now that is a crisis.

N is for the National Treasury Management Agency. Despite doing the unglamorous job of issuing bond paper to foreigners on behalf of the government, the NTMA gets a very good press. Britain's debt agency is known less mysteriously as the UK Debt Management Agency. The NTMA was long synonymous with Michael Somers. John Corrigan is the new boss of the NTMA and, fittingly, an ex-officio member of Nama.

O is for Obama who, worried by what the European market crisis could do to world recovery, urged Angela Merkel to commit German taxpayers to bail out Greece and other eurozone countries.

P is for Portugal, where a few weeks ago the cost of borrowing money for ten years shot up over 6%. That momentarily made Ireland's rates the third-most expensive in the eurozone after Greece. Portuguese rates have since fallen back and Ireland is back in second place.

Q is for quantitative easing, the fancy term for when countries print money by having their central banks buy up their own national bonds. The European Central Bank last week started to buy the national debt paper of unspecified eurozone countries.

R is for renminbi yuan, the Chinese currency. The European debt crisis is even being blamed for giving Beijing an excuse not to devalue its currency against the dollar. If only China would start buying oodles of European debt.

S is for spreads, a bit of market jargon that describes the widening gap between what Germany, the euro's anchor tenant, pays to borrow and what Greece, Ireland and Portugal must pay. Only a few years ago, Ireland was in touching distance of Germany; last week the spread was a huge 2%.

T is for tragedy, as in Greek tragedy, or similarly worded headlines evoking the ancient sagas and suggesting that Greek flaws are the sole source of Europe's woes.

U is for unemployment, the surprisingly ignored key indicator of the sovereign debt crisis. The more jobless rates rise, the more difficult it is for governments to meet their debt repayments. Bondholders are trying to figure out whether austerity budgets will make it more or less likely they will get repaid.

V is for a V-shaped economic recession and recovery. If only...

W is for a double-dip recession. Even European leaders would not be so daft as to let a European debt crisis bulge into a new recession. Would they?

X is for xenophobia. There is nothing like a good old-fashioned national debt crisis to reassert European stereotypes on decidedly xenophobic bond markets. The Greeks, their Mediterranean cousins and their distant Celtic relations are, by common market opinion, reckless spenders. The thrifty Germans have, of course, been anointed as economically virtuous.

Y is for yen, the reserve currency that helps Japan service the world's largest government debt pile. Fitch forecast that Japan's debt will reach 219% of its GDP next year. That almost makes Greece's 131% debt burden look puny.

Z is for zloty, the Polish currency. For a few days in recent weeks, it was cheaper for Poland to borrow money than Ireland. Polish debt next year is likely to peak at 56% of its GDP, compared to 118% here.