The ability to produce spellings of words that reflect the sounds within them is an important step in literacy development. To examine the properties of words that promote phonological spelling, we asked 75 U.S. preschoolers (mean age 4 years, 11 months) to spell words such as bead that begin with a sequence of sounds that matches the name of a letter in one session and control words such as bed in another session. Children’s spellings of letter-name words were higher in phonological plausibility than their spellings of control words. When we categorized spelling performance in a session as prephonological if the child used phonologically appropriate letters no more often than expected by chance, we found that children were more likely to be prephonological spellers in the session with control words but not the session with letter-name words than to show the opposite pattern. The results suggest that words with letter names can help children move from prephonological spellings to spellings that symbolize at least some of the sounds in words.