Letter frequency in English: most and least common letters

E is the most common letter in English (about 12.7% of all letters), and Z is the least common (about 0.07%). From most to least frequent, the full order is E T A O I N S H R D L C U M W F G Y P B V K J X Q Z. The table below gives the distribution for all 26 letters.

English letter frequency table (A–Z)

Figures are approximate relative frequencies in typical English text. Exact numbers vary a little depending on which body of text is counted.

Most common letters in English

The 5 most common letters are E, T, A, O and I. Together they cover about 45% of everything you read. Add N, S, H and R and you have the "ETAOIN SHRDLU" sequence that typesetters used to arrange their keys by. Only 12 letters cover about 80% of English text.

Least common letters in English

The least common letter is Z (about 0.07%), followed by Q (0.1%), X (0.15%) and J (0.15%). Ranked from rarest, the 10 least used letters are Z, Q, X, J, K, V, B, P, Y and G. Q almost always comes with a U, which is part of why it's so rare on its own.

Not every letter shows up equally often in English text. This natural imbalance is exactly why games use a genuinely random letter generator instead of relying on someone's gut sense of "picking randomly" — human guesses tend to skew toward common, easy letters.

Letter counter: count how many of each letter

Paste any text below to count how many times each letter appears and see its frequency. It's useful for cryptogram and cipher puzzles, checking a pangram, or comparing your own writing with the English averages above.

Why This Chart Helped Me Win Scrabble

I learned this trick from my dad. He always saved E, A, R, T tiles because they show up the most. This chart proves him right — E and T are the most common letters, while Q, Z, and X are rare. Pro tip for word games: focus on words with E, A, I, O, N and you'll score way more points. I jumped from 200 to 350 points after using this 😉

Using letter frequency in game design

Letter frequency is worth knowing if you're designing word games, scoring systems, or puzzles. A round that lands on Z should probably be worth more points than one that lands on E, simply because far fewer words start with it. This is also why the Scattergories letter die leaves out the rarest letters. You can roll that same 20-letter die with our online letter dice roller.

Why this matters for a fair random letter pick

A generator that's truly random by design, like ours, has nothing to do with how often letters appear in English text — every letter A through Z has an equal 1-in-26 chance on each draw, regardless of how rare that letter is in real words. That's a different and more useful kind of fairness for games than weighting by real-world frequency would be.

See it for yourself

Our random letter generator includes a live letter-frequency stats chart that tracks the distribution of your own generated results over time — a good way to see, in practice, that the tool isn't quietly favoring common letters even though English text does.

Using rare letters in games

If a round lands on a rare letter like Q, X, or Z and your group wants a fairer challenge, our word games guide covers scoring adjustments and alternate formats for exactly this situation, and the exclude-letters option lets you rule out a letter entirely if it's making a round too difficult.

Frequently asked questions