Prooffreader.com, apart from having a clever name (look more closely) also produces clever infografics. Seeing the distribution of English letters within words graphed so clearly?might inspire a re-evaluation of the?QWERTY keyboard.?When minding your Ps and Qs, you’ll notice that?both letters share a similar distribution pattern, mostly appearing at the beginning of words and then trailing percipitously thereafter. Is this why?the letters are segregated on opposite sides of the keyboard, though in the same row? Has anyone ever’really confused the two? Also, how does one analyze letter frequency anyway?
“I used a corpus rather than a dictionary so that the visualization would be weighted towards true usage. In other words, the most common word in English, ‘the’ influences the graphs far more than, for example, ‘theocratic,'” writes Prooffreader scribe David Taylor of his process.
So, obviously, Ernest Wright’s book?Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter “E”?was not included,?lest it skew its results (though some wag skewed the Kindle search results by describing it as “Not an ‘E’-book” which is just too clever by half).
