Letter Frequencies in the English Language (2024)

The inventor of Morse code, Samuel Morse (1791-1872), needed to know this so that he could give the simplest codes to the most frequently used letters. He did it simply by counting the number of letters in sets of printers' type. The figures he came up with were:

12,000	E	2,500	F
9,000	T	2,000	W, Y
8,000	A, I, N, O, S	1,700	G, P
6,400	H	1,600	B
6,200	R	1,200	V
4,400	D	800	K
4,000	L	500	Q
3,400	U	400	J, X
3,000	C, M	200	Z

However, this gives the frequency of letters in English text, which is dominated by a relatively small number of common words . For word games, it is often the frequency of letters in English vocabulary, regardless of word frequency, which is of more interest. The following is a result of an analysis of the letters occurring in the words listed in the main entries of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (9th edition, 1995) 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)