Wordle Players, Here Are the Most Popular Letters: Guess These First

How about this May 29 Wordle puzzle? The five-letter answer in The New York Times online word guessing game has probably broken a few winning streaks, since it begins with the rarest letter in the English language. I never guess this letter except out of complete and utter despair. Personally, I like to stick to seed words that I know have some of the most frequently used letters. (TRAIN and CLOSE are among my favorites.)

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In order to get the best seed words, you need to know which letters appear most in English. I contacted the big minds at the Oxford English Dictionary – you know, the huge, multi-volume dictionary that no one actually owns, but which your school librarian loved. An OED representative sent me a list in which the staff analyzed all the main entries in the concise version of the dictionary.

“It should be noted that the coin is quite old,” the OED representative apologized. “He mentions that the statistics come from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary from 2004, although current colleagues are not sure when the article itself was written, and I fear we do not have a more recent analysis of this type.”

The list may be 20 years old, but I’m sticking to it. The alphabet is not like ice cream flavors or musical acts: no new fashionable letters were introduced in this era. So whether you’re new to Wordle or want to edit your seed words and make sure they still match the most common letters, this list is for you.

S starts most English words

The most common letter is no surprise to most people: it’s E, and it’s immediately followed by another vowel, A. And these letters are much, much more popular than the last two letters on the OED list, which are J and Q. (Anyone else surprised that J is used less than X and Z?)

“The letter E is more than 56 times more common than Q in the formation of individual English words,” according to the OED analysis.

He notes that “there are more English words beginning with the letter S than with any other letter.”

So, Wordle players, bookmark this article and you might find yourself doing a little better in games to come. Here are the letters of the alphabet ordered by their frequency of appearance in the 2004 Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

The most commonly used letters in English

1. E

2. A

3. A.

4. I

5. Oh

6. T

7. N

8. S

9. L

10. C

11. U

12. D

13. P.

14. Mr.

15. H

16. G

17. B

18. F

19. Yes

20. W

21. K

22. V

23. X

24. Z

25. J.

26. Q