English letter frequency — visualized by length and position

What this means

Overall frequency shows how often each letter appears across all words of the selected length. By position shows the top-5 most common letters at each position (1 through length).

For Wordle strategy, position matters: S is the dominant position-1 letter; vowels dominate positions 2 and 3; E and Y dominate position 5. This is why optimal openers like SALET place each letter where it’s most likely to score green.

For Scrabble, the high-frequency letters (E, A, R, O, T, L, I, S) are 1 point each — the game’s scoring is calibrated against this exact frequency distribution. The rare letters (Z, Q, X, J at 8–10 points) score high because they appear rarely.

Frequencies vary by source

Three different data sources produce three slightly different letter frequencies:

• Dictionary frequency (this tool): each unique word counts once. Skews toward less-common letters because dictionaries include obscure technical terms.
• Text frequency (e.g., Project Gutenberg corpus): each occurrence in actual text counts. Skews toward common-word letters (THE, OF, AND).
• Curated frequency (e.g., Wordle’s 2,315-answer list): a specific filter. Wordle’s answer list deliberately skews toward common, recognizable words.

For most strategy use, dictionary frequency (what this tool shows) is close enough.

About the dataset

This tool reads the ENABLE word list — ~80,000 English words from 1–8 letters, public domain, the historical basis for North American Scrabble. Filters out predominantly-proper-noun entries.

Related

For Wordle-specific letter frequency with curated answer-list numbers, see Wordle statistics. For optimal-opener calculations, see the Wordle starter ranker. For more on language letter frequency, the Wikipedia article on letter frequency is comprehensive.