What is Letter Frequency?
It’s a program that permit to the users to study the frequency of letters in a text and it’s based on the fact that, in any given stretch of written language, certain letters and combinations of letters occur with varying frequencies. Moreover, there is a characteristic distribution of letters that is roughly the same for almost all samples of that language. More recent analyses show that letter frequencies tend to vary, both by writer and by subject.
The ‘top twelve’ letters comprise about 80% of the total usage.
How can I use Letter Frequency?
The method is used as an aid to breaking classical ciphers.
Modern International Morse code encodes the most frequent letters with the shortest symbols.
Similar ideas are used in modern data-compression techniques such as Huffman coding.
Letter, bigram, trigram, word frequencies, word length, and sentence length can be calculated for specific authors, and used to prove or disprove authorship of texts, even for authors whose styles aren’t so divergent.
The use of letter frequencies and frequency analysis plays a fundamental role in several games, including hangman, Scrabble, Wheel of Fortune, Definition, and cryptograms.
The interface
The screen is divided in two part: the top one visualize the same text in two languages with two patterns where each square corrispond to a letter and to each letter is associate a color; the botton one, instead, permite an overview of the use of letters in more languages of the same text. The color code is the same for both the rappresentations.
The interaction
On the left of the top area there is a menu with all the letters of the latin alphabet. The user can move over them in order to visualize on the patterns only the letter selected, so to make easier the confront between the two different languages.
Try the applet here
Download program files
silviaBoscolo-letterFrequency
To run the applications directly, open the folder called application.macosx (or application.windows) double click letterFrequency8.
To run the program in Processing, put the whole folder in your Processing Sketchbook folder; open Processing and choose letterFrequency from the Sketch menu.