Letter frequency of E
Letter frequency
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The most common letter in the English alphabet is E. The frequency of letters in text has often been studied for use in cryptography, and frequency analysis in particular. No exact letter frequency distribution underlies a given language, since all writers write slightly differently. Linotype machines assumed the letter order, from most to least common, to be etaoin shrdlu cmfwyp vbgkjq xz based on the experience and custom of manual compositors. Likewise, Modern International Morse code encodes the most frequent letters with the shortest symbols; arranging the Morse alphabet into groups of letters that require equal amounts of time to transmit, and then sorting these groups in increasing order, yields e it san hurdm wgvlfbk opjxcz yq. Similar ideas are used in modern data-compression techniques such as Huffman coding.
Contents
[hide]
1 Introduction
2 Relative frequencies of letters in the English language
3 Relative frequencies of the first letters of a word in the English language
4 Relative frequencies of letters in other languages
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
Introduction[edit source | editbeta]
More recent[when?] analyses show that letter frequencies, like word frequencies, tend to vary, both by writer and by subject. One cannot write an essay about x-rays without using frequent Xs, and the essay will have an especially strange letter frequency if the essay is about the frequent use of x-rays to treat zebras in Qatar. Different authors have habits which can be reflected in their use of letters. Hemingway's writing style, for example, is visibly different from Faulkner's. Letter, bigram, trigram, word frequencies, word length, and sentence length can be calculated for specific authors, and used to prove or disprove authorship of texts, even for authors whose styles are not so divergent.
Accurate average letter frequencies can only be gleaned by analyzing a large amount of
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The most common letter in the English alphabet is E. The frequency of letters in text has often been studied for use in cryptography, and frequency analysis in particular. No exact letter frequency distribution underlies a given language, since all writers write slightly differently. Linotype machines assumed the letter order, from most to least common, to be etaoin shrdlu cmfwyp vbgkjq xz based on the experience and custom of manual compositors. Likewise, Modern International Morse code encodes the most frequent letters with the shortest symbols; arranging the Morse alphabet into groups of letters that require equal amounts of time to transmit, and then sorting these groups in increasing order, yields e it san hurdm wgvlfbk opjxcz yq. Similar ideas are used in modern data-compression techniques such as Huffman coding.
Contents
[hide]
1 Introduction
2 Relative frequencies of letters in the English language
3 Relative frequencies of the first letters of a word in the English language
4 Relative frequencies of letters in other languages
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
Introduction[edit source | editbeta]
More recent[when?] analyses show that letter frequencies, like word frequencies, tend to vary, both by writer and by subject. One cannot write an essay about x-rays without using frequent Xs, and the essay will have an especially strange letter frequency if the essay is about the frequent use of x-rays to treat zebras in Qatar. Different authors have habits which can be reflected in their use of letters. Hemingway's writing style, for example, is visibly different from Faulkner's. Letter, bigram, trigram, word frequencies, word length, and sentence length can be calculated for specific authors, and used to prove or disprove authorship of texts, even for authors whose styles are not so divergent.
Accurate average letter frequencies can only be gleaned by analyzing a large amount of