It is well known that in English S is by far the most frequent initial letter; to put it another way, S is the biggest section of any English dictionary. But what about the other letters? The table below shows the number and percentage of each letter taken from the tenth edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COED). Apart from the old chestnut of what constitutes a word, it must be borne in mind that this dictionary includes some abbreviations, acronyms, proper names and compound words. Nevertheless, the figures are interesting. S leads with 11.65% and is followed by C with 9.44%. As is to be expected, X (0.09%) is the least common with Z (0.27%), Y (0.38%) and J (0.95%) also below 1%. L (3.71%) is nearest to the statistical average for 26 letters of 3.85%.
I have performed the same operation for Spanish words using the Gran Diccionario Oxford (GDO) bilingual dictionary (third edition). In addition to the above caveats it must be said that this includes some Latin-American words, and that it uses the modern sort and does not alphabetise CH and LL separately. In Spanish C is the clear leader followed by A. As in English, the least common is X (0.04%), a bit lower than Ñ (0.07%) and both of them lower than the non-Spanish letters W (0.09%) and K (0.23%). F (3.51%) is closest to the 27-letter average of 3.70%.
Click on the image below to make it bigger.
For if you've got five minutes to spare: how does it pan out phonetically - eg in Spanish adding a whole bunch of the c- to the k- and q-?
Posted by: trebots | 25/03/2012 at 23:03