Is format preserving encryption suitable for use with words or names? Is it possible to use FPE to encrypt names and language words like 'Bob' 'the' 'tree', in order to preserve both length and format (like keeping characters within a certain range like A-Z a-z)

The only way I can think of at the moment is to reduce each character to it's decimal value  and encrypt that.  But that doesn't seem very secure (wouldn't each character map to exactly the same value each time?)
The obvious way to FPE strings of $N$ characters of [A-Za-z] is to treat the string as a base-52 value (with each character being a digit, say, A=0, B=1, ..., y=50, z=51); do a base conversion of that to an integer between 0 and $52^N-1$; use a standard FPE technique to encrypt that value into another integer between 0 and $52^N-1$, and do a base conversion back into a string of $N$ characters of [A-Za-z].

Because you're encrypting the string as a whole, you don't have the data leakage you would have if you encrypted each character individually.