What Letter Do Most English Words Start With? We Counted 52,271
2026-11-02 · Vocab Learning
What letter do most English words start with? The answer changes with what you count. If you count the words in a dictionary, it is S (11.9%). If you count the words people actually read and write, every time each one appears, it is T (15.2%), and that is almost entirely because of THE.
Three ways of counting
We asked the same question of three sets of words. The dictionary is 52,271 everyday words of 3 to 8 letters from SCOWL, the spell-checker word list, with plurals and past tenses included. Running text is the top 100,000 English words in the wordfreq frequency data, each weighted by how often it is used. The third set is WordMaster's 966 five-letter answers.
| # | Dictionary | Common | 5-letter answers | Running text |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | S 11.9% | S 13.2% | S 15.4% | T 15.2% |
| 2 | C 9.1% | C 8.7% | C 8.6% | A 11.6% |
| 3 | P 7.3% | P 7.4% | A 6.6% | I 7.5% |
| 4 | B 7.0% | B 6.8% | B 6.6% | S 6.8% |
| 5 | T 5.8% | R 6.0% | P 6.1% | O 6.3% |
Dictionary: 52,271 words · Common: 24,261 (SCOWL level 35 or below) · 5-letter answers: 966 · Running text: wordfreq's top 100,000 words, weighted by use.
Narrowing the dictionary barely changes the order. The 24,261 words SCOWL grades as common still run S, C, P, B. Among the game answers S does even better and starts about one answer in six (15.4%).
Why S leads the dictionary
Of the 6,233 words that start with S, 61% follow it with a consonant: ST (880), SP (585), SH (577), SC (493), SL (348), then SW, SN, SK, SM and SQ: ten S-plus-consonant openings that each start at least ten words. By the same measure C, G, K and P manage four each, mostly with R, L or H. No other letter goes in front of so many different consonants.
C and P, in second and third place, owe a lot to prefixes. CO- starts 1,334 of the 4,761 C words, including 264 with CON- and 151 with COM-. PR- starts 614 of the P words, PRO- (226) and PRE- (188) among them.
Why T leads running text
Count every word each time it appears in text and the order flips. THE alone makes up 5.7% of all words; add TO (2.9%), THAT (1.1%) and THIS (0.7%) and those four supply more than 10 of T's 15.2 percentage points. A comes second because of AND, A, AS, ARE and AT, and I comes third because of IN, I, IS and IT. In running text, a handful of short function words that turn up in almost every sentence set the order.
The rarest first letters
The rarest first letter in the dictionary is X, with 31 of 52,271 words. Then come Z (182), Y (233), Q (285) and J (617). In running text, words starting with X are 0.03% of all words, Z 0.05% and Q 0.19%. Among WordMaster's five-letter answers, exactly one starts with X: XENON.
And the last letter?
At the end of the word, the method of counting makes an even bigger difference. In the dictionary 26.9% of words end in S, and 86% of those become another listed word when the S or ES is dropped, so they are mostly plurals and third-person verbs. In running text E leads with 19.3%, with THE again doing much of the work. WordMaster's five-letter answers mostly leave plurals out, so E is their most common last letter as well, at 22.8%.
Using this in a word game
- S starts 15.4% of five-letter answers, more than any other letter. If you don't know the first letter yet, S is the best bet.
- E ends the most answers (22.8%), then T (13.1%), R, Y and D.
- Once you know the word starts with S, the second letter is likely a consonant: T, H, P, C or L.
To narrow down candidates from the letters you know, use the word finder; to browse every answer, see the 5-letter word list.
How this was counted, as of November 2, 2026: the dictionary figures cover the 52,271 lowercase, alphabetic 3-8 letter words in SCOWL (Kevin Atkinson, size levels up to 70) that WordMaster accepts as guesses. Proper names and abbreviations are excluded; plurals, past tenses and other inflected forms are included. "Common" means SCOWL size level 35 or below. Running-text figures weight the top 100,000 English words in wordfreq 3.1.1 (Robyn Speer; data CC BY-SA 4.0) by each word's frequency. Every figure can be recomputed with scripts/first_letter_stats.py.