🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct15.140918.27296@emr1.emr.ca> nyelle@ccrs.emr.ca (Norman Yelle) writes:
>If you have an on-line copy of the dictionnary, then you can do the
>following:
>
>  grep -i e /usr/dict/words | wc
>
>... to find how many words contain the letter 'e'.  You can do this for all
>26 letters.  This is the results I got with a dictionary of 25144 words:

That's not a good way to determine the frequency of letters in actual text,
which is what you generally want for cryptanalysis, because it gives
equivalent weight to letters in words that are used with different
frequencies, and doesn't give extra weight to letters that appear multiple
times in a word.  Here's your list sorted by frequency:

   e   14835
   a   13190
   r   11533
   i   11428
   t   10599
   o   10285
   n   10256
   s    8700
   l    8625
   c    7204
   u    5989
   d    5324
   m    5320
   p    4929
   h    4844
   b    3862
   g    3756
   y    3523
   f    2342
   w    1907
   v    1848
   k    1848
   x     616
   j     427
   z     380
   q     377

Notice how different it is from ETAOIN SHRDLU, the beginning of the usual
letter frequency list.  That's probably mostly because of the extreme
frequency of the word "the" in text; it drags T and H several notches
higher.
-- 
Barry Margolin
System Manager, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com          {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar