Letter frequency "The Gold-Bug", where the method is successfully applied to decipher a message instructing on the whereabouts of a treasure hidden by Captain Kidd. Letter frequencies had a strong effect on the design of some keyboard layouts. The most frequent letters are on the bottom row of the Blickensderfer typewriter, and the home row of the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. There are three ways to count letter frequency that result in very different charts for common letters. The first method, used in the chart below, is to count letter frequency in root words of a dictionary. The second is to include all
Word ladder be connected with a word ladder. Knuth used a fixed collection of 5,757 of the most common English five-letter words, excluding proper nouns. He determined exactly when two words of the collection had a word ladder between them via other words in the collection. Knuth found that most words were connected to each other, and he also found that 671 words of the collection did not form a word ladder with any other words. He called these words "aloof", because "aloof" is itself an example of such a word. Word ladder Word ladder (also known as Doublets, word-links, change-the-word puzzles,