There's a very famous novel from 1939 called Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright. It's about 50,000 words long. It tells a complete story with characters, dialogue, a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it contains exactly zero instances of the letter E. Not one. Read that again: fifty thousand words without using the most common letter in the English language. Wright had to tie down the E key on his typewriter to keep from accidentally hitting it. The book opens with a sentence that immediately signals something is off: "If youth, throughout all history, had had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically, you wouldn't constantly run across folks today who claim that 'a child don't know anything.'" It's awkward. It's strained. But it's E-free โ and it proves just how dependent English is on this one vowel.
The Numbers Don't Lie
In a typical English text, the letter E appears about 12.7% of the time. That's roughly one in every eight characters. T comes in second at about 9.1%, and then A at 8.2%. E appears nearly 50% more often than T โ its nearest competitor. On the other end of the spectrum, Z shows up about 0.074% of the time. You'll see roughly 170 E's for every Z. If the alphabet were a kingdom, E would be the emperor on a golden throne while Z scrubbed the palace floors.
These frequencies aren't random trivia. They're the basis of how Morse code optimizes for efficiency โ E is the shortest possible signal: a single dot (ยท). Samuel Morse knew exactly which letter to give the shortest code. They're also the foundation of frequency analysis in cryptography โ if you intercept an encrypted message and one symbol appears suspiciously often, it's almost certainly the letter E.
But... Why E?
Three reasons E is everywhere, and they all reinforce each other like three legs of a very literary stool.
First: The Great Vowel Shift (yes, again). During that 300-year pronunciation earthquake I talked about in a previous article, long E's shifted but short E's mostly stayed put. The short "eh" sound โ the E in "bed" and "red" โ didn't move much. Meanwhile, unstressed vowels across the board collapsed into a schwa (the "uh" sound โ like the A in "about"), which in English spelling is very often represented by... you guessed it, E. The silent E at the end of words (which isn't actually silent โ it modifies the preceding vowel, as in "cap" vs. "cape") is another E-heavy spelling convention that got locked in during the standardization of English orthography.
Second: Grammar demands it. The letter E is the engine of English grammar. The definite article "the" โ the single most common word in English โ contains an E. The past tense marker "-ed" ("walked," "talked," "laughed") ends in E. The agent suffix "-er" ("teacher," "worker," "driver") ends in E. The superlative suffix "-est" ends in E. Plural markers, possessive markers, the word "be" in all its forms (be, been, being), and on and on. If you tried to remove E from English grammar, you'd need to rebuild the entire tense system from scratch.
Third: It's the default vowel. In languages with five-vowel systems (a, e, i, o, u), the mid-front vowel โ the E sound โ is often the most acoustically "neutral" vowel. It sits right in the middle of the vowel space, neither too high nor too low, neither too far forward nor too far back. It's the Goldilocks vowel. When English speakers hesitate, they say "uhhh" โ which, again, commonly gets spelled with an E. When a vowel needs to fill a gap between consonants, E frequently gets the job.
Life Without E: The Lipogram Challenge
A lipogram is a text that deliberately avoids a certain letter. E-lipograms are the most challenging because E is so common. Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby took him nearly six months of obsessive work. He claimed he burned five drafts before getting it right. Georges Perec, the French experimental writer, wrote an entire 300-page novel called La Disparition (1969) without using the letter E โ in French, where E is even more common than in English. It was later translated into English as A Void by Gilbert Adair, who also managed to avoid E throughout the entire translation. I cannot overstate how difficult this is. Try writing a single paragraph without using the letter E. Go ahead. I'll wait. See? You got three sentences in before you accidentally typed "the" and had to start over.
The E constraint forces writers into bizarre contortions. You can't use "the." You can't use "be." You can't use past tense for regular verbs. You can't use "he" or "she" or "we." Your vocabulary shrinks by an estimated 60% or more. Reading the resulting text feels like walking through a linguistic obstacle course โ everything is slightly off, slightly awkward, like English being spoken by someone who learned it on another planet.
The Scrabble Perspective
In Scrabble, E tiles are worth one point โ the lowest possible value. There are twelve E tiles in a standard English Scrabble set, more than any other letter. The game designers knew what they were doing. E's ubiquity makes it low-value; Q and Z, being rare, are worth ten points each. A Scrabble player who draws a rack full of E's and A's has flexibility but no firepower. The scoring system is a miniature economic model of English letter frequency.
So the next time you glance at a page of text and notice how many E's are scattered across it like freckles, spare a thought for the linguistic history encoded in those little horizontal lines and curves. The letter you see the most is the letter that's been doing the most work, quietly, for a thousand years โ and Ernest Vincent Wright proved that trying to do without it will drive you slightly insane.