English Letter Frequency – Redux

Back on September 15, 2010 I wrote a little piece, “Frequency – Scrabble and the actual frequency of letter usage in English”, about what seemed to me to be a puzzling mis-match between the number of tiles in Scrabble and my superficial sense of the frequency of occurrence of letters in English.  While I was away in Hong Kong in December, I received the following email note from David T. Wong, Continue reading

Frequency – Scrabble and the actual frequency of letter usage in English

Frequency of letters in ScrabbleIn counting the number of tiles in a Scrabble game (preparation for the Hudson Area Library Scrabble Tournament) I found this distribution (picture left). Could this really be the frequency of the use of letters in English? Off to Google land. From the Oxford English dictionary website came this interesting chart: Continue reading