An Analysis of Letter Dynamics in the English Alphabet
Neil Zhao Diana Zheng
The frequency with which the letters of the English alphabet appear in
writings has been applied to the field of cryptography, the development of
keyboard mechanics, and the study of linguistics. We expanded on the
statistical analysis of the English alphabet by examining the average frequency
which each letter appears in different categories of writings. We evaluated
news articles, novels, plays, scientific publications and calculated the
frequency of each letter of the alphabet, the information density of each
letter, and the overall letter distribution. Furthermore, we developed a metric
known as distance, d that can be used to algorithmically recognize different
categories of writings. The results of our study can be applied to information
transmission, large data curation, and linguistics.