The most common letters, in order
In our list of 168,406 English words, the letters rank E S I A R N T O L C D U. E alone is 11.5% of all letters. The five rarest are W, Z, X, Q, J.
Why S is second, not T
You may know the order ETAOIN SHRDLU, which comes from counting letters in running text. Text repeats the same short words (the, to, that) thousands of times, which pushes T and H up. A word list counts each word once, so plurals and verb endings count as much as anything else: that is why S rises to second place and I to third.
Which count matters depends on the game. For Hangman, Wordle and Scrabble you are looking for one word among many, so the word-list count is the right one.
How many words contain each letter
A different question: how often does a letter appear at least once in a word? E is in 69.7% of English words, S in 59.6%, I in 58.3% and A in 53.7%. Q is in only 1.5%.
Most common first and last letters
| Rank | First letter | Share of words | Last letter | Share of words |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | S | 11.1% | S | 37.3% |
| 2 | C | 9.3% | E | 9.9% |
| 3 | P | 8.3% | D | 9.4% |
| 4 | A | 6.1% | G | 7.7% |
| 5 | R | 5.9% | Y | 7.6% |
| 6 | D | 5.8% | R | 5.6% |
| 7 | M | 5.5% | T | 5.0% |
| 8 | B | 5.5% | N | 4.4% |
S starts 11.1% of words and ends 37.3% of them, because plurals and verb forms (walks, cats) end in S. Endings like -ED, -ING and -LY explain D, G and Y in the last-letter column. These are the letters to try first when you know only the end of a word in the word finder.
Best letters to guess in Hangman, by word length
In Hangman the useful number is how many possible words contain a letter. The best first guess changes with the length of the word:
| Word length | Words | Best guess | 2nd | 3rd | 4th |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 967 | A (30.9%) | E (25.2%) | O (23.9%) | I (17.4%) |
| 4 | 3,878 | A (35.6%) | E (34.4%) | S (32.9%) | O (27.0%) |
| 5 | 8,612 | S (46.3%) | E (45.0%) | A (40.5%) | R (30.9%) |
| 6 | 15,207 | E (61.2%) | S (45.6%) | A (43.2%) | R (39.9%) |
| 7 | 23,087 | E (65.8%) | S (53.1%) | I (47.5%) | A (46.7%) |
| 8 | 28,406 | E (68.7%) | S (57.9%) | I (54.4%) | A (50.7%) |
| 9 | 24,864 | E (73.2%) | S (64.5%) | I (61.0%) | R (54.6%) |
| 10 | 20,293 | E (76.5%) | I (67.6%) | S (64.8%) | R (58.4%) |
For short words, A is a better opening than E. From six letters on, E is in most words. The Hangman solver recalculates this after every guess, using only the words that still fit.
How English compares with 5 other languages
| Language | Top 5 letters | Average word length | Most common last letter |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | E S I A R | 8.9 | S (37.3%) |
| French | E S A I R | 10.2 | S (40.8%) |
| Dutch | E N R A T | 10.6 | N (22.8%) |
| Swedish | S R A N E | 10.8 | S (41.9%) |
| Danish | E S R N T | 10.8 | S (46.2%) |
| Norwegian | E N R S T | 10.6 | E (30.2%) |
E leads in five of the six lists; Swedish is the exception, where S comes first. Dutch words end in N more than anything else (plurals and verbs in -en), Norwegian ones in E. English words are the shortest in our lists, likely because the other languages join words into long compounds.
Why game letter values follow these counts
Word games price letters by how hard they are to use. In English Scrabble, nine of the ten most common letters in our count are worth 1 point, and the 8 and 10 point letters (J, X, Q, Z) are four of the five rarest. See the highest scoring Scrabble words for what that means on the board.
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Method and sources
Counted on 27 September 2026 over the 168,406 words of the ENABLE list (public domain), 2 to 15 letters each, every word counted once. Other languages use the lists named on the sources page. French accents are removed in our list, so É counts as E.
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