What is the most common letter in English?
E is the most common letter in English, making up about 11 to 13 percent of the letters in typical text. T, A, O and I are the next most common.
Letter frequency is measured by counting letters in large amounts of written text. E is so common because it appears in many everyday words, such as the, be, he, she, we and many words ending in -ed and -es. A common order of frequency is E, T, A, O, I, N, S, H and R.
Knowing letter frequency has practical uses. Code breakers use it to crack simple substitution ciphers, where each letter is replaced by another. In the game Wheel of Fortune, contestants are given the common letters R, S, T, L, N and E in the final round.
Keyboards and Morse code
When Samuel Morse designed his code in the 1800s, he gave the most common letters the shortest signals. E is a single dot and T is a single dash. Typesetters also kept more copies of common letters like E in their type cases.
Did You Know?
A famous 1939 novel, Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright, contains more than 50,000 words without a single letter E.