Letter Frequency

In writing, what are the most and least commonly used letters?

We each did a tally of a few sentences from a book.

 When we put the data together, it looked like this:

Then we made charts. We decided that as the numbers were so big, each square would have to stand for more than 1. At first we thought one square could be 5, but there still weren't enough squares so we decided on each square representing 10.

Here we are talking about our charts:


In both classes we found that E was the most common letter. Next came T and A.

People use letter frequency to work out codes.

For instance we have been looking at this message in code -

The code is going to be

too hard for anyone to

work out. There should

be a prize for anyone

who can decode it!

- and using letter frequency to make guesses about what the letters are.