The letter E is the most common letter in the English language.

Linguists and mathematicians study how often letters appear by scanning millions of words in books and newspapers. Their data shows that E appears about 11.16 percent of the time. This is much higher than the next most common letters, which are A and R.In the 1830s, Samuel Morse noticed this pattern while looking at sets of metal letters used in printing presses. He saw that printers kept more copies of the letter E than any other letter. Because it was so common, he gave E the shortest signal in Morse code, which is a single dot. This made sending telegrams faster.In 1948, a scientist named Claude Shannon used math to prove exactly how often each letter appears. This information helps people who break secret codes. Since E is the most common letter, codebreakers look for the most frequent symbol in a secret message and guess that it represents E.Writing without the letter E is very difficult. In 1939, an author named Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a book called Gadsby that contains 50,000 words but never uses the letter E. This type of writing is called a lipogram. It is hard to do because E is part of almost every basic sentence structure in English.