However, this gives the frequency of letters in English text, which is dominated by a relatively small number of common words (see 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 the Concise Oxford Dictionary (9th edition, 1995) and came up with the following table:

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 beginning with the letter 's' than with any other letter. (This is mainly because clusters such as 'sc', 'sh', 'sp', and 'st' act almost like independent letters.) The letter 'e' only comes about halfway down the order, and the letter 'x' unsurprisingly comes last.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the commonest English Words?

The only way to measure this is to analyse a large collection (or 'corpus') of texts, but lists based on different collections (or 'corpora') tend to disagree about even the top ten words in English. A rough top thirty might look something like this:

the
of
and
a
to
in
is
that
it
was
he
for
as
on
with
his
be
at
you
I
are
this
by
from
had
have
they
not
or
one

But you, for example, comes 8th in a list derived from the 'American Heritage' corpus (Carroll et al, 1971), 12th in a list based on the British National Corpus, 32nd in a list based on the 'LOB' (Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen) corpus (Hofland & Johansson 1982), and 33rd in a list based on the 'Brown' corpus (Francis & Kucera 1982).