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occur hundreds of times in that article.Īnother factor to consider is the nationality or writing style of the author. As you might guess, the letters that compose the abbreviation et al. Mean ?” contains only one z -in the word italicize.
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Why? Because the subject is rare letters of the alphabet! Another article published on the Grammarly Blog, “ What Does Et Al. In this article, the letter z occurs sixteen times. What about this article? It is actually a good illustration of how subject matter and author affect letter frequency. And if you value the opinion of cryptologists (people who study secret codes and communication), x, q, and z make the fewest appearances in the writing scene. In dictionaries, j, q, and z are found the least, but some of the words are rarely used. If you want to know which letters are used least in everyday English, you might agree with Samuel Morse’s j, x, and z. It depends on how you are defining rarity. Zim’s Codes and Secret Writing and Robert Lewand’s Cryptological Mathematics, claim that x, q, and z are the letters you are least likely to encounter.Īs you can tell, not everyone agrees on which letters are the rarest. Which letters appear least if you consider a wider range of English vocabulary?Īccording to the English for Students website, j, q, and z occur the least if you analyze the frequency of each letter in the entries of the 11th Concise Oxford Dictionary. However, people using Morse code mainly use the shortest and most common English words. In modern Morse code, j y, and q are least frequent. He found the smallest numbers of j, x, and z. While developing his famous code, Samuel Morse counted how many of each letter were contained in sets of printer’s type. Grammarly helps you communicate confidently Write with Grammarly The least frequent letters