Random Letter Generator

How this letter generator works

You need a random letter, or a handful of them. Maybe you are playing a word game, picking something at random, teaching the alphabet, or just need a letter to start from. This tool gives you one in a tap, and the page below covers how it works and a few things worth knowing about letters.

It runs on the 26 letters of the English alphabet, A to Z, in capitals. Press Generate for one, or set the Number box from 1 to 100 for a batch. Because there are only 26 letters and the tool does not repeat any within a batch, asking for more than 26 simply gives you all of them.

The three boxes below let you pin a specific letter if you want one in particular: type it into any of them and that is what you get. Left empty, the tool just picks at random. The Copy button lifts your letters to the clipboard.

The 26 letters of the alphabet

The English alphabet has 26 letters, and they split into two groups. Five are vowels, A, E, I, O, and U, with Y sometimes joining them, as in "sky" or "happy". The other twenty-one are consonants. Every word in English is built from these 26, which is a small toolkit for such an enormous vocabulary. That is the quiet magic of an alphabet: a couple of dozen symbols, endlessly recombined.

Which letters appear most

Not all letters pull the same weight. If you count letters across a large body of English writing, the same pattern shows up every time. E is the most common by a wide margin, at around 12 percent of all letters, followed by T, A, and O. At the other end, J, Q, X, and Z are rare, together making up less than one percent. The old printer's phrase "etaoin shrdlu" comes from the first two columns of a Linotype keyboard, laid out in roughly the order the twelve commonest letters appear. Only roughly: count a modern corpus and the order runs closer to E T A O I N S R H L D C.

This is not just a curiosity. It is why E and A are worth a single point in Scrabble while Q and Z are worth ten, and it is the basis of frequency analysis, the classic trick for cracking simple letter-substitution codes: find the most common symbol, and it is probably standing in for E.

Ways people use random letters

• Word games. Scattergories and "name something that starts with..." games run on a random letter. Generate one and race to fill the categories.
• Teaching the alphabet. A random letter is handy for flashcards, a letter of the day, or "find something in the room starting with this letter" with young children.
• Picking at random. Assign letters to choices and let the tool decide. A quick, fair way to break a tie or set an order.
• Drawing and improv prompts. A letter can seed a doodle, a name, or a quick game.

Questions people ask

How many letters does it use?

All 26 letters of the English alphabet, A to Z, shown in capitals.

Can I get lowercase letters?

The tool gives capital letters. If you need lowercase, you can change them once they are copied.

What is the most common letter in English?

E, by a good distance, appearing around 12 percent of the time, followed by T, A, and O. The rarest are J, Q, X, and Z.

Can I generate more than 26 at once?

You can ask for up to 100, but since there are only 26 letters and the tool does not repeat within a batch, you will get all 26 and no more.

How many vowels and consonants are there?

Five vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and twenty-one consonants, with Y sometimes acting as a vowel.

References

1. An Analysis of Letter Dynamics in the English Alphabet (arXiv)
2. Frequency analysis (Wikipedia)