What’s the Most Common Letter?

What do you think the most common letter in English is? Well, it certainly isn’t X or Z.

When I was about six years old, I had a flawed and baseless theory that R was the most common letter, I later discovered that theory was wrong, but I never pursued the question until recently: what is the most common letter in English? My findings were quite interesting.

Have you made your guess yet? Hint: I’ve already used this letter forty-two times prior to this sentence in this post alone! I’m going to spoil it now, last chance to make your guess.

The most common letter in English is E. That’s right, E is the most common letter in the English language; I suppose I should have known it would be a vowel. 

This is possibly nonsensical to you, it certainly was to me. I’ve wondered, is it really true that this humble vowel is the most used letter? Maybe some data will provide some proof, or disproof.

Let’s compare the letter frequency from the Oxford Dictionary to a much more practical source, but what?… Maybe this very blog… but I wouldn’t be crazed enough to tediously analyze each letter from every one of my fourteen previous posts. I definitely would not be deranged enough to sum, categorize, compare, and graph all 25,000 letters, would I be? Yep, I would be; I summed, categorized, compared, and graphed all 25,000 letters.

Hilariously, I built an app, code and all, to sort and list the frequency of each letter, when there are preexisting websites that do that job. Too late, I will be using my app anyway, but I did check the results of my app, to insure accuracy, and it was exactly consistent with other sources.

Here are the results:

These statistics are insane; I used my free will to write the words that I either wanted or saw fit, and yet, I still used E more than any other letter; a ridiculous 3,000 times! Even the frequency of most other letters is fairly close to that of the Oxford Dictionary! There is some variation between the results, likely because the topics of this blog are quite specific, unlike a dictionary.

Toward the bottom of the page from my second linked source, there is a chart showing the frequency of letters in some of the most common European languages, including English, and according to their statistics, E is the most frequent letter in nearly all of those languages. This phenomenon is apparently not specific to English.

Evidently, it is not fictitious; this simple letter, often hidden in plain sight, truly is as ubiquitous as claimed. Even I, though exercising my free will, am undeniably subject to this involuntary principle. It is irrepressible.

If you had one, what letter did you formerly think to be the most common? Try to say it without any E’s!  

Onward American 🇺🇸

Source: Oxford Letter Frequency

Source: Letter Frequency