According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), E appears in approximately 11% of all common English words. The letter E is also the most commonly struck letter on your keyboard, second only to the space bar. E appears in the most common English noun time, the most common verb be, in the pronouns he, she, me, and we, as well as tens of thousands of words ending in -ed and -es.
The second most common letter is T, with A, I, N, O, and S tying for third. The least-used letter in the alphabet is Q.
In an exercise called constrained writing, composing prose without the letter E is a scribe’s ultimate challenge. Ernest Vincent Wright’s 1939 novel, Gadsby, contains 50,000 words, none of which include the letter E. The 1969 novel, La Disparition (The Disappearance), by Georges Perec, is another 300-page story without the letter E.
Did you know E is also a number? With the possible exception of π, e is the most important constant in mathematics since it appears in myriad mathematical contexts involving limits and derivatives. Most are familiar with this mathematical constant when used in banking for compounded interest and is numerically valued at 2.71828.
Do you know which letter begins the most words in the dictionary? Do you know the Power of “X”? Why do Americans say /zee/ for the letter Z when the rest of the world says /zed/? What does ampersand (&) actually mean and was it really part of the alphabet?
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