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Fact Check: B

“b”
Seventh least frequent
Confidence: High Checked on July 18, 2026

Summary

The letter B ranks as the seventh least commonly used letter in English, appearing in roughly 1.5 % of words. This places it near the bottom of the frequency distribution among the 26 letters of the English alphabet.

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Sources 58 searched

pi.math.cornell.edu
  • Frequency Table

    Frequency Table · English Letter Frequency (based on a sample of 40,000 words) · Letter · Count · Frequency · 21912 · 12.02 · 16587 · 14810

mathcenter.oxford.emory.edu
  • Letter Frequencies in English

    th, he, in, en, nt, re, er, an, ti, es, on, at, se, nd, or, ar, al, te, co, de, to, ra, et, ed, it, sa, em, ro · the, and, tha, ent, ing, ion, tio, for, nde, has, nce, edt, tis, oft, sth, men

cs.wellesley.edu
  • English letter frequencies

    Tom's Letter Frequencies (in order) By analyzing roughly 15000 characters, or roughly 2700 words from three separate sources, Tom came up with the statistics below.

en.wikipedia.org
  • English alphabet - Wikipedia

    Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word alphabet is a compound of alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet. The earliest Old English writing during the 5th ...

  • A - Wikipedia

    In English, the name of the letter is the long A sound, pronounced /ˈeɪ/. Its name in most other languages matches the letter's pronunciation in open syllables. The earliest known ancestor of A is aleph—the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet—where it represented a glottal stop [ʔ]

  • B - Wikipedia

    As /b/ is one of the sounds subject ... example, compare the various cognates of the word brother. It is the seventh least frequently used letter in the English language (after V, K, J, X, Q, and Z), with a frequency of about 1.5% in words....

languagetool.org
  • The 26 Letters of the English Alphabet

    The English alphabet is composed of 26 letters, which are: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z Each letter has an

en.wiktionary.org
  • B - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

    Mind your Bs and Ts […] And if the combined efforts of macrophages, b cells and t cells are sufficient, the pathogen will be beaten back and eventually cleared from the body. ... From the use of the letter ‘B’ as an arbitrary label among other letter labels.

alphabetmyths.com

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