“We did an analysis of the letters occurring in the words listed in the main entries of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (11th edition revised, 2004) 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.”¹

Comparing the piles in my picture to this chart immediately suggested that something was fishy about the distributions in Scrabble. “S”, for example is the eight most frequent letter according to Oxford’s analysis. But, in my picture the “S” pile is noticeably shorter than might be expected. Turns out that the inventor of Scrabble, Alfred Butts, created his frequency analysis from a scan of the NY Times but only included four “S” tiles to make it more difficult to use pluralization as a scoring strategy.² So, the distribution in Scrabble is not without  influences of the strategy of the game itself.

1. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/frequencyalphabet
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Mosher_Butts

Tomorrow, Nov. 3rd, is Election Day here and around the state. On the ballot in Hudson and Greenport is a proposition to increase support to the Hudson Area Library. I have been working on this initiative and pass along the following reasons to go to the polls and say, “Yes” at the Library Budget line.

Hudson provides $48,000 per year to support the library and this has been unchanged for a decade. Greenport provides support of $5,500. This tiny tax support puts our local library at the bottom of the pile in the Mid-Hudson Libraries consortium. Purchases of new books and maintenance of even minimal services are barely possible. Keeping a professional librarian on staff is barely possible. The library has been running a deficit for years and is about to exhaust its endowment. So, voting yes tomorrow will save the library and put it on a footing where we can begin to think about creating a level of services that will meet expanding demands for access to books, magazines, Internet, childrens’ reading needs, and more.

A Yes vote will increase public tax-based support for the library from $53,500 per year to #136,500 at the cost of roughly $2.50 per person per month.

Libraries are an important element in a knowledge based world. Hudson needs to meet the challenge of providing everyine with access to the knowledge of the world.

Vote Yes on the Library Budget question