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44-533: L , or l , is the twelfth letter of the Latin alphabet , used in the modern English alphabet , the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is el (pronounced / ˈ ɛ l / EL ), plural els . Lamedh may have come from a pictogram of an ox goad or cattle prod . Some have suggested that it represents a shepherd's staff. In most sans-serif typefaces,

88-513: A lowercase form (also called minuscule ). Upper- and lowercase letters represent the same sound, but serve different functions in writing. Capital letters are most often used at the beginning of a sentence, as the first letter of a proper name or title, or in headers or inscriptions. They may also serve other functions, such as in the German language where all nouns begin with capital letters. The terms uppercase and lowercase originated in

132-549: A variety of modern uses in mathematics, science, and engineering . People and objects are sometimes named after letters, for one of these reasons: The word letter entered Middle English c.  1200 , borrowed from the Old French letre . It eventually displaced the previous Old English term bōcstæf ' bookstaff '. Letter ultimately descends from the Latin littera , which may have been derived from

176-472: A dictionary. The lemma is the word in its canonical form. The second method is to include all word variants when counting, such as "abstracts", "abstracted" and "abstracting" and not just the lemma of "abstract". This second method results in letters like ⟨s⟩ appearing much more frequently, such as when counting letters from lists of the most used English words on the Internet. ⟨s⟩

220-523: A given language, since all writers write slightly differently. However, most languages have a characteristic distribution which is strongly apparent in longer texts. Even language changes as extreme as from Old English to modern English (regarded as mutually unintelligible) show strong trends in related letter frequencies: over a small sample of Biblical passages, from most frequent to least frequent, enaid sorhm tgþlwu æcfy ðbpxz of Old English compares to eotha sinrd luymw fgcbp kvjqxz of modern English, with

264-502: A number of dedicated codepoints in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block . Another means of reducing such confusion is to use symbol ℓ , which is a cursive , handwriting-style lowercase form of the letter "ell". In Japan and Korea, for example, this is the symbol for the liter . (The International Committee for Weights and Measures recommends using L or l for the liter, without specifying

308-425: A rudimentary technique for language identification , where it is particularly effective as an indication of whether an unknown writing system is alphabetic, syllabic , or ideographic . The use of letter frequencies and frequency analysis plays a fundamental role in cryptograms and several word puzzle games, including hangman , Scrabble , Wordle and the television game show Wheel of Fortune . One of

352-399: A table after measuring 40,000 words. In English, the space character occurs almost twice as frequently as the top letter ( ⟨e⟩ ) and the non-alphabetic characters (digits, punctuation, etc.) collectively occupy the fourth position (having already included the space) between ⟨t⟩ and ⟨a⟩ . The frequency of the first letters of words or names

396-415: A typeface.) In Unicode , the cursive form is encoded as U+2113 ℓ SCRIPT SMALL L from the " letter-like symbols " block. Unicode encodes an explicit symbol as U+1D4C1 𝓁 MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT SMALL L . The TeX syntax <math>\ell</math> renders it as ℓ {\displaystyle \ell } . In mathematical formulas, an italic form ( ℓ ) of

440-614: A typical [l] sound, while upper-case ⟨L⟩ represents a voiceless [l̥] sound, a bit like double ⟨ll⟩ in Welsh . The International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨ l ⟩ to represent the voiced alveolar lateral approximant and a small cap ⟨ ʟ ⟩ to represent the voiced velar lateral approximant . The Latin letters ⟨L⟩ and ⟨l⟩ have Unicode encodings U+004C L LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L and U+006C l LATIN SMALL LETTER L . These are

484-496: A variety of sources (press reporting, religious texts, scientific texts and general fiction) and there are differences especially for general fiction with the position of ⟨h⟩ and ⟨i⟩ , with ⟨h⟩ becoming more common. Different dialects of a language will also affect a letter's frequency. For example, an author in the United States would produce something in which ⟨z⟩

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528-803: Is a type of grapheme , the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes , the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called a multigraph . Multigraphs include digraphs of two letters (e.g. English ch , sh , th ), and trigraphs of three letters (e.g. English tch ). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H , Greek eta ⟨Η⟩ , and Cyrillic en ⟨Н⟩ are homoglyphs , but represent different phonemes. Conversely,

572-456: Is considered to be a separate letter from ⟨n⟩ , though this distinction is not usually recognised in English dictionaries. In computer systems, each has its own code point , U+006E n LATIN SMALL LETTER N and U+00F1 ñ LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE , respectively. Letters may also function as numerals with assigned numerical values, for example with Roman numerals . Greek and Latin letters have

616-562: Is especially common in inflected words (non-lemma forms) because it is added to form plurals and third person singular present tense verbs. A final method is to count letters based on their frequency of use in actual texts, resulting in certain letter combinations like ⟨th⟩ becoming more common due to the frequent use of common words like "the", "then", "both", "this", etc. Absolute usage frequency measures like this are used when creating keyboard layouts or letter frequencies in old fashioned printing presses. An analysis of entries in

660-519: Is helpful in pre-assigning space in physical files and indexes. Given 26  filing cabinet drawers, rather than a 1:1 assignment of one drawer to one letter of the alphabet, it is often useful to use a more equal-frequency-letter code by assigning several low-frequency letters to the same drawer (often one drawer is labeled VWXYZ), and to split up the most-frequent initial letters ( ⟨s, a, c⟩ ) into several drawers (often 6 drawers Aa-An, Ao-Az, Ca-Cj, Ck-Cz, Sa-Si, Sj-Sz). The same system

704-404: Is indicated by the existence of precomposed characters for use with computer systems (for example, ⟨á⟩ , ⟨à⟩ , ⟨ä⟩ , ⟨â⟩ , ⟨ã⟩ .) In the following table, letters from multiple different writing systems are shown, to demonstrate the variety of letters used throughout the world. Letter frequency Letter frequency

748-651: Is more common than an author in the United Kingdom writing on the same topic: words like "analyze", "apologize", and "recognize" contain the letter in American English, whereas the same words are spelled "analyse", "apologise", and "recognise" in British English. This would highly affect the frequency of the letter ⟨z⟩ , as it is rarely used by British writers in the English language. The "top twelve" letters constitute about 80% of

792-637: Is represented by ⟨gli⟩ in Italian , ⟨ll⟩ in Spanish and Catalan , ⟨lh⟩ in Portuguese , and ⟨ļ⟩ in Latvian . In Turkish , ⟨l⟩ generally represents / l / , but represents / ɫ / before ⟨a⟩ , ⟨ı⟩ , ⟨o⟩ , or ⟨u⟩ . In Washo , lower-case ⟨l⟩ represents

836-492: Is significantly different from the overall frequency of all the digits in a set of numeric data, an observation known as Benford's law . An analysis by Peter Norvig on words that appear 100,000 times or more in Google Books data transcribed using optical character recognition (OCR) determined the frequency of first letters of English words, among other things. *See İ and dotless I . The figure below illustrates

880-582: Is the number of times letters of the alphabet appear on average in written language . Letter frequency analysis dates back to the Arab mathematician Al-Kindi ( c.  801 –873 AD), who formally developed the method to break ciphers . Letter frequency analysis gained importance in Europe with the development of movable type in 1450 AD, where one must estimate the amount of type required for each letterform . Linguists use letter frequency analysis as

924-513: Is used in some multi-volume works such as some encyclopedias . Cutter numbers , another mapping of names to a more equal-frequency code, are used in some libraries. Both the overall letter distribution and the word-initial letter distribution approximately match the Zipf distribution and even more closely match the Yule distribution . Often the frequency distribution of the first digit in each datum

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968-517: Is visibly different from Faulkner 's. Letter, bigram , trigram , word frequencies, word length, and sentence length can be calculated for specific authors, and used to prove or disprove authorship of texts, even for authors whose styles are not so divergent. Accurate average letter frequencies can only be gleaned by analyzing a large amount of representative text. With the availability of modern computing and collections of large text corpora , such calculations are easily made. Examples can be drawn from

1012-536: The Caesar cipher used by Julius Caesar , so this method could have been explored in classical times). Letter frequency analysis gained additional importance in Europe with the development of movable type in 1450 AD, where one must estimate the amount of type required for each letterform, as evidenced by the variations in letter compartment size in typographer's type cases. No exact letter frequency distribution underlies

1056-447: The VIC cipher or some other cipher based on a straddling checkerboard typically uses a mnemonic such as "a sin to err" (dropping the second "r") or "at one sir" to remember the top eight characters. There are three ways to count letter frequency that result in very different charts for common letters. The first method, used in the chart below, is to count letter frequency in lemmas of

1100-576: The home row of the Blickensderfer typewriter , the Dvorak keyboard layout , Colemak and other optimized layouts. The frequency of letters in text has been studied for use in cryptanalysis , and frequency analysis in particular, dating back to the Arab mathematician al-Kindi (c. 801–873 AD), who formally developed the method (the ciphers breakable by this technique go back at least to

1144-451: The velarized alveolar lateral approximant (IPA [ɫ] ) occurs in bell and milk . This velarization does not occur in many European languages that use ⟨l⟩ ; it is also a factor making the pronunciation of ⟨l⟩ difficult for users of languages that lack ⟨l⟩ or have different values for it, such as Japanese or some southern dialects of Chinese . A medical condition or speech impediment restricting

1188-540: The Concise Oxford dictionary, ignoring frequency of word use, gives an order of "EARIOTNSLCUDPMHGBFYWKVXZJQ". The letter-frequency table below is taken from Pavel Mička's website, which cites Robert Lewand's Cryptological Mathematics . According to Lewand, arranged from most to least common in appearance, the letters are: etaoinshrdlcumwfgypbvkjxqz . Lewand's ordering differs slightly from others, such as Cornell University Math Explorer's Project, which produced

1232-441: The English letter frequency sequence as " ETAON RISHD LFCMU GYPWB VKJXZQ ", the most common letter pairs as "TH HE AN RE ER IN ON AT ND ST ES EN OF TE ED OR TI HI AS TO", and the most common doubled letters as "LL EE SS OO TT FF RR NN PP CC". Different ways of counting can produce somewhat different orders. Letter frequencies also have a strong effect on the design of some keyboard layouts . The most frequent letters are placed on

1276-645: The Greek diphthera 'writing tablet' via Etruscan . Until the 19th century, letter was also used interchangeably to refer to a speech segment . Before alphabets, phonograms , graphic symbols of sounds, were used. There were three kinds of phonograms: verbal, pictures for entire words, syllabic, which stood for articulations of words, and alphabetic, which represented signs or letters. The earliest examples of which are from Ancient Egypt and Ancient China, dating to c.  3000 BCE . The first consonantal alphabet emerged around c.  1800 BCE , representing

1320-785: The Phoenicians, Semitic workers in Egypt. Their script was originally written and read from right to left. From the Phoenician alphabet came the Etruscan and Greek alphabets. From there, the most widely used alphabet today emerged, Latin, which is written and read from left to right. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters, nineteen of which the Latin alphabet used, and the Greek alphabet, adapted c.  900 BCE , added four letters to those used in Phoenician. This Greek alphabet

1364-458: The bottom of the lowercase letter ell . Other style variants are provided in script typefaces and display typefaces . All these variants of the letter are encoded in Unicode as U+004C L LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L or U+006C l LATIN SMALL LETTER L , allowing presentation to be chosen according to each context. For specialist mathematical and scientific use, there are

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1408-438: The days of handset type for printing presses. Individual letter blocks were kept in specific compartments of drawers in a type case. Capital letters were stored in a higher drawer or upper case. In most alphabetic scripts, diacritics (or accents) are a routinely used. English is unusual in not using them except for loanwords from other languages or personal names (for example, naïve , Brontë ). The ubiquity of this usage

1452-566: The distinct forms of ⟨S⟩ , the Greek sigma ⟨Σ⟩ , and Cyrillic es ⟨С⟩ each represent analogous /s/ phonemes. Letters are associated with specific names, which may differ between languages and dialects. Z , for example, is usually called zed outside of the United States, where it is named zee . Both ultimately derive from the name of the parent Greek letter zeta ⟨Ζ⟩ . In alphabets, letters are arranged in alphabetical order , which also may vary by language. In Spanish, ⟨ñ⟩

1496-530: The earliest descriptions in classical literature of applying the knowledge of English letter frequency to solving a cryptogram is found in Edgar Allan Poe 's famous story " The Gold-Bug ", where the method is successfully applied to decipher a message giving the location of a treasure hidden by Captain Kidd . Herbert S. Zim , in his classic introductory cryptography text Codes and Secret Writing , gives

1540-571: The late 7th and early 8th centuries. Finally, many slight letter additions and drops were made to the common alphabet used in the western world. Minor changes were made such as the removal of certain letters, such as thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩ , wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ , and eth ⟨Ð ð⟩ . A letter can have multiple variants, or allographs , related to variation in style of handwriting or printing . Some writing systems have two major types of allographs for each letter: an uppercase form (also called capital or majuscule ) and

1584-407: The lowercase letter ell ⟨l⟩ , written as the glyph l , may be difficult to distinguish from the uppercase letter "eye" ⟨ I ⟩ (written as the glyph I ); in some serif typefaces, the glyph l may be confused with the glyph 1 , the digit one . To avoid such confusion, some newer computer fonts (such as Trebuchet MS ) have a finial , a curve to the right at

1628-662: The most extreme differences concerning letterforms not shared. Linotype machines for the English language assumed the letter order, from most to least common, to be etaoin shrdlu cmfwyp vbgkqj xz based on the experience and custom of manual compositors. The equivalent for the French language was elaoin sdrétu cmfhyp vbgwqj xz . Arranging the alphabet in Morse into groups of letters that require equal amounts of time to transmit, and then sorting these groups in increasing order, yields e it san hurdm wgvlfbk opxcz jyq . Letter frequency

1672-451: The pronunciation of ⟨l⟩ is known as lambdacism . In English orthography, ⟨l⟩ is often silent in such words as walk or could (though its presence can modify the preceding vowel letter's value), and it is usually silent in such words as palm and psalm ; however, there is some regional variation. L is the eleventh most frequently used letter in the English language. ⟨l⟩ usually represents

1716-583: The same code points as those used in ASCII and ISO 8859 . There are also precomposed character encodings for ⟨L⟩ and ⟨l⟩ with diacritics, for most of those listed above ; the remainder are produced using combining diacritics . Variant forms of the letter have unique code points for specialist use: the alphanumeric symbols set in mathematics and science, and halfwidth and fullwidth forms for legacy CJK font compatibility. [REDACTED] Letter (alphabet) A letter

1760-453: The script ℓ is the norm. In English orthography , ⟨l⟩ usually represents the phoneme / l / , which can have several sound values, depending on the speaker's accent, and whether it occurs before or after a vowel. In Received Pronunciation , the alveolar lateral approximant (the sound represented in IPA by lowercase [l] ) occurs before a vowel, as in lip or blend , while

1804-513: The sound [l] or some other lateral consonant . Common digraphs include ⟨ll⟩ , which has a value identical to ⟨l⟩ in English, but has the separate value voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (IPA [ɬ] ) in Welsh , where it can appear in an initial position. In Spanish, ⟨ll⟩ represents /ʎ/ ( [ʎ] , [j] , [ʝ] , [ɟʝ] , or [ʃ] , depending on dialect). A palatal lateral approximant or palatal ⟨l⟩ (IPA [ʎ] ) occurs in many languages, and

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1848-451: The total usage. The "top eight" letters constitute about 65% of the total usage. Letter frequency as a function of rank can be fitted well by several rank functions, with the two-parameter Cocho/Beta rank function being the best. Another rank function with no adjustable free parameter also fits the letter frequency distribution reasonably well (the same function has been used to fit the amino acid frequency in protein sequences. ) A spy using

1892-508: Was the first to assign letters not only to consonant sounds, but also to vowels . The Roman Empire further developed and refined the Latin alphabet, beginning around 500 BCE. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the development of lowercase letters began to emerge in Roman writing. At this point, paragraphs, uppercase and lowercase letters, and the concept of sentences and clauses still had not emerged; these final bits of development emerged in

1936-695: Was used by other telegraph systems, such as the Murray Code . Similar ideas are used in modern data-compression techniques such as Huffman coding . Letter frequencies, like word frequencies , tend to vary, both by writer and by subject. For instance, ⟨d⟩ occurs with greater frequency in fiction, as most fiction is written in past tense and thus most verbs will end in the inflectional suffix -ed / -d . One cannot write an essay about x-rays without using ⟨x⟩ frequently. Different authors have habits which can be reflected in their use of letters. Hemingway 's writing style, for example,

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