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Thursday, 14 March 2013

Letter frequency analysis

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What is letter frequency analysis?

 

It is the study of statistically how often each letter in the alphabet occurs in different languages.

The heading is the list (from left to right) of the most frequently occuring letters in the English language.

Find the list of frequencies of letters in dfferent languages (including klingon, naturally) here

What uses does this have?

This has applications in the mathematical field of cryptography as some encryptions can be broken by noticing that some letters occur more than others in certain languages. Then, using the frequency analysis statistics, you can discover the encryption key and then break the decrypt the message.

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