What are the commonest English words?
). For word games, it is often the frequency of letters in English vocabulary, regardless of word frequency, which is of more interest. We did an analysis of the letters occurring in the words listed in the main entries of theConcise Oxford Dictionary(11th edition revised, 2004) and came up with the following table:E 11.1607% 56.88 M 3.0129% 15.36 A 8.4966% 43.31 H 3.0034% 15.31 R 7.5809% 38.64 G 2.4705% 12.59 I 7.5448% 38.45 B 2.0720% 10.56 O 7.1635% 36.51 F 1.8121% 9.24 T 6.9509% 35.43 Y 1.7779% 9.06 N 6.6544% 33.92 W 1.2899% 6.57 S 5.7351% 29.23 K 1.1016% 5.61 L 5.4893% 27.98 V 1.0074% 5.13 C 4.5388% 23.13 X 0.2902% 1.48 U 3.6308% 18.51 Z 0.2722% 1.39 D 3.3844% 17.25 J 0.1965% 1.00 P 3.1671% 16.14 Q 0.1962% (1)The third column represents proportions, taking the least common letter (q) as equal to 1. The letter E is over 56 times more common than Q in forming individual English words.The frequency of letters at the beginnings of words is different again. There are more English words
