Five of the letters in the English Alphabet are vowels: A, E, I, O, U.Unless we all work together to make the word zyxqz a thing, the letter E can pride itself as being the most popular letter for the foreseeable future. Still, datasets like these do provide extremely large sample sizes and give a pretty good representation of letter usage in writing.īased on the data, it seems like the letter E will stay on top until we invent a new article or two. Neither factor in the extensive usage of words on social media, for example. Another dataset that has been used is the database of every book that has ever been entered into Google’s Ngram Viewer.Įven these humongous datasets still clearly have some shortcomings. For example, one option is to count letter frequency while using a dataset consisting of every article that exists in the English version of Wikipedia. In modern times, it has become more popular to use word databases compiled from samples based on actual usage in writing. However, this method doesn’t account for actual word frequency, and it often excludes plurals and verb tenses (forms ending in -s, -ed, -ing, etc.). In the past, a commonly used method was to use all of the base words in a dictionary (or multiple dictionaries) as the sample. Which sample is used, though, often differs depending on the researcher. Typically, letter frequency calculations simply involve counting the letters used in a particular sample of writing. Least common is better than going extinct! Learn about two letters that don’t exist anymore. It may be more surprising to learn that the letter K often beats out the letter V to round out the bottom five spots. It probably won’t come as much surprise to learn that the letters Q, J, and X often appear at the bottom of the list. Its lack of usage in British English, in particular really drags it down as it can’t rely on words like analyze or synthesize for a boost. For adverbs, the word not seems to be the one people like to use the most.Īccording to most analyses, the letter Z is the least popular letter of the alphabet. When we look at adjectives, the first-place winner is the word good, which is pretty wholesome. For pronouns, the word it sits at the top of the list. (We really can never get enough of it, after all.) Unsurprisingly, the most commonly used verb is the verb be and its many different forms. So, let’s narrow our scope to words that are popularly used as just one part of speech.īased on this research, the most commonly used noun is time. For example, the word that would be both the most common pronoun and adverb, and that is just boring. When considering word frequency, it makes the most sense to limit the list to those that are commonly used in only one way.

What is the most common noun, verb, pronoun, adjective, and adverb? This word is so common that it boosts the letters E and T into the top five, and the letter H often drops significantly in usage if the frequency of the is not accounted for. It appeared four times in the previous sentence alone. What is the most commonly used word?Īccording to the data, the word the is almost always the most popular word in English. That wishy-washy “sometimes vowel” Y, though, usually finds itself among the less commonly used letters. The letter U typically doesn’t make the top 10 but still hangs around the top 15. The data suggests that, yes, vowels are more common than consonants with A, E, I, and O often appearing immediately in the top five most common letters. Learn all you need to know to be a champion at Wordle! Are vowels more common than consonants? If you’re going that route, it seems like AROSE and UNTIL would make a good pair of guesses to start with. If your strategy depends on letter frequency in five-letter words, then your top 10 letters are going to be: There are several strategies a person could use to try to win a certain daily game focused around five-letter words. What are the most common letters in five-letter words?

E’s frequency is likely due to the fact that it appears in the word the, the many plurals that end in -es, and in commonly used pronouns such as he, she, me, we, and they.įor the curious, the list of the top 10 letters used in the English language typically consists of some arrangement of the following letters: E typically takes first place regardless of which analysis method is used. Once you know the A-B-Cs of most commonly used letters and other facts below, head over to our quiz to demonstrate your not-so-common word skills! What is the most common letter?Īccording to the data, the most common letter in the English language is the letter E.

Spelling alphabet british english