Dear Chief Secretary to the Treasury,
I'm afraid to tell you there's no money left.
Signed, Liam Byrne

(Outgoing Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury. May 2010)
.
.

Saturday 16 January 2010

Playing Hangman.

No, this post is nothing to do with this sort of person, it's to do with the game where you choose letters one at a time and try to make a word before your alter-ego is throttled by a noose suspended from a gibbet that your incorrect guesses have helped to construct.

Mrs Rigby has such a game down there at the bottom of her blog page and has been trying out a few experiments. She has found that in this particular online Hangman, which is probably aimed at children, T,R and N are the most commonly used consonants whilst E is the most commonly used vowel.

This is probably due to the target audience, because it doesn't quite cross reference against more carefully carried out research carried out by Samuel Morse (who designed the Morse Code) and by Christopher Latham Scholes (who designed the QWERTY keyboard).

For those who prefer a slightly analytical, scientific, approach to crosswords, cryptograms, anagrams and word puzzles composed in English there are lists of most commonly used letters and letter combinations here and here.

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