Letter frequency in English: the full picture from 168,401 words
Every schoolbook says E is the most common letter in English. True — but nearly everything else you have heard about letter frequency depends on how you count. We counted all 168,401 words in our dictionary. Here is what came out.
Two ways to count letters
The famous frequency order ETAOIN SHRDLU comes from counting letters in running text — books, newspapers, letters. Text counting weights every occurrence of common little words: each the donates a T, an H and an E, which is why T and H rank so high. A dictionary count is different: every word appears once, however often people use it. Count that way across our 168,401 words and the order becomes E S I A R N — E still first, but S and I surge (plurals and -ING/-ITY endings), while T and H fall away with the no longer stuffing the ballot.
The top ten
| Letter | Share of all letters | Words containing it |
|---|---|---|
| E | 11.54% | 69.6% |
| S | 9.48% | 59.6% |
| I | 8.90% | 58.3% |
| A | 7.60% | 53.7% |
| R | 7.10% | 51.9% |
| N | 6.79% | 47.9% |
| T | 6.61% | 47.3% |
| O | 6.52% | 45.1% |
| L | 5.32% | 39.1% |
| C | 4.06% | 31.3% |
The second column counts every occurrence; the third asks a subtly different question — how many words contain the letter at least once. E appears in 70% of all words; S in 60%.
The rare end
| Letter | Share of all letters | Words containing it |
|---|---|---|
| Z | 0.47% | 3.9% |
| X | 0.30% | 2.6% |
| Q | 0.17% | 1.5% |
| J | 0.16% | 1.4% |
J appears in barely 1.4% of words and Q in 1.5% — which is exactly why Scrabble prices them at 8 and 10 points. The tile values from 1948 track dictionary scarcity remarkably well: the ten 1-point letters are all in our top twelve, and the letters worth 8 or 10 (J, X, Q, Z) are all in our bottom five.
Common words shuffle the order
Restrict the count to our 8,112 most common words and the order shifts to E I S A R T: S slips because the common list is lighter on plural forms, and T climbs back towards its running-text rank. Moral: there is no single "correct" frequency order — there is one per corpus. Vowels, for the record, make up 38% of all letter occurrences in our dictionary.
What to do with this
Letter frequency is the quiet engine behind most word games. It picks your Wordle opener, orders your hangman guesses (where the best order changes with word length), and explains why a rack full of Es feels safe but scores little. If you want to poke at the data yourself, every list on this site — by length or by letter — reports its exact counts.