The Most Popular Letters In The World, According To Google

If you had to reorder the alphabet according to the popularity of letters in Google, it would be called the alphaiot. Which, actually, has a quite nice ring to it. It will also look like this.

Now, can anybody explain to me why 6 is the most popular number? [Smäll]

Discuss

(18 Comments)
  • [–]

    Samuel

    Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 8:38 AM

    Would be interesting to compare I to I minus words relating to apple products…

    • [–]

      Luke

      Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 1:20 PM

      Similarly how many times was x counted in uses such as sex or even XXX. the alphaiot sucks…

  • [–]

    Grant Hawkins

    Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 9:19 AM

    the devil: 666

  • [–]

    Jon

    Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 9:39 AM

    OK we need an internet campaign to promote Z and J.
    I humbly submit the word Zujj – all we have to do is to get that into common usage. Anyone have any ideas?

  • [–]

    Michael Pengilley

    Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 9:52 AM

    How did you get alphaiot? Wouldn’t it be the AIS?

    • [–]

      StevoTheDevo

      Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 10:14 AM

      alphaIST or alphaISTE more likely…

    • [–]

      Grant Hawkins

      Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 10:42 AM

      Alphabet:
      A = Alpha
      B = Beta
      A+B = Alphabet

      A= Aplpha
      I= Iota
      A+I = Alphaiot

      It would probably be changed to Alphiot IMO.

      • [–]

        Grant Hawkins

        Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 10:42 AM

        lol sorry, the second A is meant to equal Alpha as well

  • [–]

    Disco_box

    Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 1:24 PM

    Fascinating stuff.

    I’m curious and pondering why Q is higher that U. Perhaps its relevant to Iraq and IQ searches?

    • [–]

      RM

      Friday, January 14, 2011 at 3:19 PM

      Letter frequency orders vary slightly depending on source, but one letter frequency order mnemonic for English is “Etaon(a) Ir(i)sh”. The chart above doesn’t even come close to that.

      Looking at the poster, I think that the searches was probably done with a non-English version of Google. Different languages have different letter frequencies, and Google tailors results based on the version (and language) of the page you perform the search in.

      • [–]

        Benjamin

        Saturday, January 15, 2011 at 6:01 AM

        Moreover, if you just type a letter in google, you’ll get all single occurrences of the letter that is the letter as a word. Therefore it is not surprising that you get many results for “a” which is the indeterminate article and “I” which is the first person pronoun. This has nothing to do with frequencies of letters and nothing to do with popularities of the letters.

  • [–]

    boc

    Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 3:08 PM

    Looks like it’s time to update the points for each tile in Scrabble.

    • [–]

      Mixa

      Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 9:05 PM

      exactly what I was thinking

      • [–]

        Mixa

        Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 9:06 PM

        or at the very least…Words with Friends

  • [–]

    Bob

    Friday, January 14, 2011 at 9:20 PM

    IMHO, and thinking on the number of results per letter, the popularity of each one is taken from the letter ‘alone’, not belonging to a word. For me the amazing result in to see the very small difference between the first two letters, and the huge difference between the second and the third (close to x6), while the third to the very last is only about x3.

  • [–]

    James

    Saturday, January 15, 2011 at 5:46 AM

    It’s only like this because of the fact A and I etc are often used on their own whereas E is not. I bet E is still used more times if you include within other words, but a simple google search wouldn’t reflect that.

  • [–]

    Marco Valtas

    Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 8:18 AM

    Interesting that the numbers doesn’t follow the Benford’s Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfords_law).

  • [–]

    cas

    Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 10:12 PM

    has anyone check the numbers? I put 6 in google.com and I get 16,690,000,000, and I put 1 and get 25,340,000,000

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