All Exhibits
Frequency Keyboard
The heights of the columns represent how common the letters are in English. What is the most common letter in English?
What is the second most common letter in English?
What are the rare letters in English?
In a game of hangman, the best letters to pick are letters like e, t and a because they are the most common letters and turn up in a lot of words. In fact, ‘e’ is the most common letter and turns up about 13% of the time. This is a clue for code breakers because when we turn the alphabet into a code, the symbol for ‘e’ will become the most common symbol in the code. Other clues for code breakers include looking at common pairs or triplets of letters. This idea is called frequency analysis and is one of the first uses of statistics in history.