Etaoin Shrdlu

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

Cecil’s 1986 column What’s the origin of the mysterious phrase “etaoin shrdlu”? mentions that “etaoin shrdlu” is the order of letter use frequency, “according to one calculation”. The letters were the first lines of the linotype keyboards (more explanation here at World Wide Words), but obviously the "one calculation came much earlier. When, and by whom?

World Wide Words says the name Etaoin Shrdlu appears in a 1931 story by Thurber. The Brown Corpus of 1971 seems to have the frequency order as etaoin srhldc umfpgw ybvkxj qz (or, etoain srhldc umfpgw ybvkxj qz), and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold Bug sets it as eaoidh nrstuy cfglmw bkpqxz (notice where the t is, and apparently nobody used j or v in those days).

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I suspect Poe’s table must be somewhat older, from a period when i/j and u/v were regarded as the same letters.

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The Gold Bug was 1843, IIRC, but the placement of the t is wrong even just using Poe’s own work.

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It it possible that Poe’s list is based on the frequency of letters in the dictionary, rather than in usage? The main reason that ‘T’ is so common in usage is that it’s in so many short common words (it, at, to, the, they, them, that), but that only accounts for seven instances in the dictionary.

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But not but not

6

One analysis of the letter frequency in the dictionary does put T all the way down to sixth place, but there’s still some glaring discrepancies in Poe’s list.