Table 1.

An example of the statistical approach to illustrate the problems associated with consistency (or the paucity of it) in English.

Letter	(%) of different / all words (exemplary word)
i	62.3	24,076	3,471,217	I(in)
	19.4	4,386	1,083,446	aI(i)
	5.1	2,519	283,459	(social)
l	95.4	22,272	2,934,160	l(all)
d	94.4	14,990	2,844,232	d(and)
m	100.0	11,176	1,817,206	m(from)
b	99.0	7,726	1,169,525	b(be)

A minimum set of single letter-sounds selected to a version of the game – list of their sounds present in >5% of the occurrence of the letter in English text (Cedex databasis, among 17 million words).