Not every letter shows up equally often in English text. "E" is the most common letter by a wide margin, followed by letters like T, A, O, and I, while Q, X, and Z appear rarely. 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.
Most and least common letters
In typical English text, E, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, and R account for the large majority of letters used, while J, Q, X, and Z are the rarest. This 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.
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.