The Most Used Letters in English
There are 26 letters in the English alphabet that form about 600,000 words in the language. This puts English as the 5th language with the most words based on dictionaries. With these facts in mind, it can be interesting to see what the most used letters are for all of these words.
According to a study done by Lexico, E is the most used letter from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, getting used in about 11% of words. Following E as part of the top five are A, R, I, and O. The list below shows the order of all letters and their frequency percentage from highest to lowest.
- E – 11.1607%
- A – 8.4966%
- R – 7.5809%
- I – 7.5448%
- O – 7.1635%
- T – 6.9509%
- N – 6.6544%
- S – 5.7351%
- L – 5.4893%
- C – 4.5388%
- U – 3.6308%
- D – 3.3844%
- P – 3.1671%
- M – 3.0129%
- H – 3.0034%
- G – 2.4705%
- B – 2.0720%
- F – 1.8121%
- Y – 1.7779%
- W – 1.2899%
- K – 1.1016%
- V – 1.0074%
- X – 0.2902%
- Z – 0.2722%
- J – 0.1965%
- Q – 0.1962%
Why is E the most used letter?
The first aspect to note is how vowels are generally used the most. Four out of all five vowels are in the top five. Compared to other vowels, E is used in some untraditional ways.
The most common ways you may think it is used are in words like the, them, her, and she. But it can also be used to determine how a previous vowel should sound.
Take the words hat and hate, for example. Hat makes the “aa” sound while hate makes the “ay” sound because E was added to the end. Likewise, it can be used silently at the end of words such as determine and moose, even though they would predominantly sound the same without the E at the end.
E is also a part of a couple endings that are frequently added to words: “able” and “er.” These can make words like comfortable, breakable, customer, partner, and so many more which all contribute to the frequency of the letter.
Why is Q the least used letter?
Q is sort of an odd letter. It has a very similar sound to the letter K yet is used in a particular way. Its main purpose is to make the sound “kw”, but, interestingly, it’s not used in words like awkward and walkway. Instead, it is used in a more familiar way for words such as quest and equals.
Q’s dependency on the letter U seems to be the most prominent factor in its unpopularity. According to these lists, there are 2400 words that contain Q and only 48 words that contain Q without U. That means that 98% of words with Q also contain the letter U.
Conclusion
Out of the 600,000 words in the English dictionary, the letter E comes out on top because of the many ways it can be used to create words. The letter Q ends up at the bottom because of its strong link to the letter U.