ETAOIN SHRDLU is now ETAOIN SRHLDCU

Many are familiar with ETAOIN SHRDLU, the nonsense string that used to appear in print because of early-20thC printer design and now serves as shorthand for the most popular letters.

Now Google’s director of research Peter Norvig has used the vast data from the Google Books corpus – over 743 billion words – to produce updated word- and letter-frequency tables.

As a Scrabble player, I find it interesting that the letter "H" is relatively overvalued, and the "B" undervalued.

Image and text from Sentence First, citing Norvig's work, which includes a wealth of data deserving of a separate post (later)(sigh).