Interactive comparison across 7 languages — with heatmaps, stats & Scrabble connections
Every language has a fingerprint hidden in its alphabet. The letter E dominates most European languages, but by how much? Does A really appear more often in Portuguese than any other letter? And why is Z worth 10 points in English Scrabble but only 1 in Italian? The answers lie in letter frequency — the statistical backbone of cryptography, word games, and computational linguistics.
Below, we compare the full letter frequency distributions for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian using data drawn from large text corpora. Use the interactive heatmap, side-by-side comparison, and downloadable tables to explore how each language distributes its 26 base Latin letters.
Each cell shows the percentage frequency of that letter in the language. Darker green = higher frequency. Hover over any cell for details.
Select two languages to compare their letter frequency distributions with bar charts.
At-a-glance metrics computed from the frequency data.
Think you know which letters appear most often? Put your intuition to the test with Lingle — our multilingual word-guessing game.
Play Lingle in English Jugar en Español Jouer en FrançaisAlfred Butts, the inventor of Scrabble, famously counted letters on the front page of The New York Times to determine tile distributions. The result: common letters like E, A, and I got more tiles and lower point values, while rare letters like Q and Z became high-scoring gambles.
Here is how real letter frequencies compare to Scrabble tile counts and point values in English:
The correlation is not perfect — Butts made practical adjustments for gameplay balance — but the influence of letter frequency on tile design is unmistakable. Languages with higher vowel frequencies (like Italian and Portuguese) have more vowel tiles in their Scrabble adaptations.
Different language editions of Scrabble adjust tile counts to match local letter frequencies:
Full frequency percentages for all 26 letters in each language. Click a column header to sort.
Data sources: The letter frequency data presented here is compiled from multiple large-corpus studies of each language. Primary sources include:
Scope: Frequencies cover the 26 base Latin letters (A-Z). Diacritical variants (e.g., Ñ in Spanish, Ç in French/Portuguese, Ä/Ö/Ü in German, Â/Î/&Ȓ;/&Ș;/&Ț; in Romanian) are counted as their base letter. This allows consistent cross-language comparison while acknowledging that some languages use additional characters.
Accuracy: Frequencies are rounded to one decimal place. Minor variations (0.1-0.3%) can occur between corpora depending on text genre (literary vs. news vs. web). The figures here represent consensus values from multiple sources.
Last updated: January 2025
A2Z Words offers dictionaries, word finders, and games across 7 languages.
Visit A2Z Words