There are two honest ways to count how often a letter occurs, and they give different answers. Count letters in running English, in books and articles, and a few workhorse words (THE above all) bend the table toward the letters they contain. Count letters across a word list instead, every word weighted the same, and the table describes the dictionary itself: its plurals, its endings, its habits of construction. Word games are played in the dictionary's world, so this page leads with the second count: every letter of all 172,823 words in this site's list, 1,570,540 letters in total, tallied one by one. The classic text count stands beside it for contrast.
The two counts, side by side
| # | Letter | In this word list | In running text |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | E | 11.51% | 12.7% |
| 2 | S | 9.52% | 6.3% |
| 3 | I | 9.01% | 7.0% |
| 4 | A | 7.57% | 8.2% |
| 5 | R | 7.07% | 6.0% |
| 6 | N | 6.85% | 6.7% |
| 7 | T | 6.68% | 9.1% |
| 8 | O | 6.59% | 7.5% |
| 9 | L | 5.31% | 4.0% |
| 10 | C | 4.09% | 2.8% |
| 11 | D | 3.38% | 4.3% |
| 12 | U | 3.27% | 2.8% |
| 13 | P | 2.94% | 1.9% |
| 14 | M | 2.84% | 2.4% |
| 15 | G | 2.70% | 2.0% |
| 16 | H | 2.32% | 6.1% |
| 17 | B | 1.84% | 1.5% |
| 18 | Y | 1.63% | 2.0% |
| 19 | F | 1.23% | 2.2% |
| 20 | V | 0.98% | 0.98% |
| 21 | K | 0.85% | 0.77% |
| 22 | W | 0.74% | 2.4% |
| 23 | Z | 0.47% | 0.074% |
| 24 | X | 0.29% | 0.15% |
| 25 | Q | 0.16% | 0.12% |
| 26 | J | 0.16% | 0.16% |
E wins under both systems, which is the only placid result in the table. Everything below it moves. Three moves explain most of the difference, and each is a lesson in how the language is built.
S climbs from seventh to second (6.3% of text, 9.5% of the list). A word list is a catalogue of forms, and English manufactures forms with S: plurals, third-person verbs, possessives. Sixty percent of the words in this list contain at least one S. Prose, where the same few S-free giants repeat endlessly, dilutes it.
H falls from eighth to sixteenth (6.1% of text, 2.3% of the list). H's text wealth is borrowed: THE, WITH, THAT, THIS and THEIR are read constantly and counted constantly. As a citizen of the dictionary, H is a modest letter that starts CH and SH words and otherwise keeps a low profile.
Z multiplies sixfold (0.07% of text, 0.47% of the list), and J sinks to last place in the list, a breath behind Q. The dictionary warehouses rare letters; prose rarely visits the warehouse. A tile game, which draws from the warehouse, should plan by warehouse numbers.
Where letters sit: five-letter words by position
For games played at a fixed length, the overall table is the wrong tool. What matters is frequency by position, and in five-letter words the positions have personalities. These are the five commonest letters at each position across the list's 8,636 five-letter words:
| Position | Commonest letters |
|---|---|
| Position 1 | S 12.2% · C 7.7% · B 6.8% · P 6.5% · T 6.3% |
| Position 2 | A 17.1% · O 15.5% · E 12.3% · I 11.2% · U 9.2% |
| Position 3 | A 9.8% · R 9.2% · I 8.6% · O 7.8% · N 7.3% |
| Position 4 | E 19.7% · A 7.6% · T 7.2% · I 6.7% · L 6.2% |
| Position 5 | S 31.2% · E 10.8% · Y 10.5% · D 6.7% · R 6.1% |
Position 2 is vowel country: the five leaders are all vowels and between them they hold 65.3% of the position. Position 5 belongs to S outright at 31.2%, the plural engine again, with E and Y sharing most of the rest. Position 4 is E's stronghold at 19.7%, the silent-E effect visible in the data: nearly a fifth of five-letter words park an E in fourth place, usually to be read as part of the ending. And position 1 is the most open seat at the table, its leader S holding only 12.2%, which is why five-letter games are won and lost in the middle and at the end. This positional table, not the overall one, is the raw material of the Wordle opener rankings and the Wordle Helper's ordering elsewhere on this site.
One position deserves a second look. Position 3 is the flattest seat in the word: its leader, A, holds only 9.8%, and the top five letters together barely reach 43%, where position 5's top five reach 65%. The middle of a five-letter word is where English keeps its variety, which is a compact way of saying that third letters are the hardest to guess and the most informative when a clue reveals one. A yellow that pins down position 3 is worth more than it looks.
Three more patterns from the same count
The average word in this list is 9.09 letters long, and 37.9% of all its letters are vowels, which is why a random handful of English letters usually contains something pronounceable. The four glamour letters of tile games, J, Q, X and Z, are a rounding error between them: 1.09% of all letters counted. And dependence has a champion. Of the 2,527 words in the list that contain a Q, 2,506 also contain a U, which is 99.2%: no other letter in English is so completely a package deal, and the whole of the Q-without-U page is the story of the 21 exceptions. Set against that, the two commonest letters are nearly universal: E appears in 70.0% of all words in the list and S in 60.1%, so a long word without either is a rarer object than most players expect, and a rack holding both is holding the language's centre of gravity.
Questions
What is the most common letter in English?
E, by either way of counting, but the margin changes. In running text E takes about 12.7% of all letters. Counted over this site's word list, every word weighted equally, E takes 11.5% of 1,570,540 letters. What changes dramatically is the chasing pack: text puts T second (9.1%) on the strength of THE and TO, while the list puts S second (9.5%) on the strength of plurals.
What is ETAOIN SHRDLU?
The twelve commonest letters of English text in order, E T A O I N S H R D L U. The phrase is an accident of printing history: typesetters on Linotype machines, whose keyboards were arranged by letter frequency, would run a finger down the keys to fill a line that had to be thrown away, and the resulting nonsense string occasionally reached print. It survives as a reminder that the text ordering in the table on this page is over a century old and was once industrial equipment.
Why is S so much higher in a word list than in text?
Because a word list counts forms, not usage. Every plural, every third-person verb, every possessive is a separate entry ending in S, and each contributes its S to the count. In running text, S-heavy common words are balanced by S-free giants like THE, OF and AND read millions of times. The same effect, smaller, lifts C and I in the list and drags H down: H lives in a handful of hyper-common text words (THE, WITH, THAT) and comparatively few dictionary entries.
Which frequency table should I use for word games?
The word-list one, and for five-letter games the positional one. A rack or a Wordle board is drawn from the dictionary's world, where every word is equally likely to be the answer, not from prose, where THE outnumbers everything. That is why this site's Wordle rankings were computed from the list itself rather than borrowed from the famous text order, and why the positional table matters more than the overall one: a letter's value depends on where it sits.
What is the rarest letter?
It depends on the counting again. In this word list the rarest is J, at 0.16% of letters, a hair behind Q. In running text the rarest is Z, at about 0.07%, because text can go pages without needing one, while the dictionary keeps hundreds of Z words in stock (ZOO, LAZY, ZEBRA and their families) whether prose calls on them or not.
Sources
- ENABLE word list (public domain): the word-list column and the positional table were counted directly from its 172,823 words (1,570,540 letters) on 28 October 2026: github.com/brokensandals/wordlists
- The running-text column is the classic table from Robert E. Lewand's Cryptological Mathematics, as reproduced in Wikipedia's letter frequency article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency
- The full checking method is on How We Verify.
Update log
28 October 2026: published, with both tables counted from the shipped word files on the same day.