The frequency and versatility of initial and terminal letters in english words

A review of previous word and letter counts in addition to the applications of these counts were reported. A comprehensive count of initial and terminal letters and bigrams was compiled based on the Ku{\v{c}}era and Francis (Computational analysis of present-day American English. Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1967) corpus of English words. The count included frequency of occurrence and versatility, or number of different words in which letters or bigrams occurred. It was shown how such counts can be used to describe "Englishness" and make predictions as to the information load of letters in words and pseudo words. {\textcopyright} 1982 Academic Press, Inc.