Random Letter Generator
Draw one letter or a run of them from the 26. Below: the odds on a vowel, why this looks nothing like written English, and how quickly repeated letters start appearing.
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The odds on one letter
Each of the 26 letters comes up once in 26, which is 3.85%. That makes a vowel – A, E, I, O or U – 5 chances in 26, or 19.2%, and a consonant 80.8%. Count Y as a vowel and it rises to 23.1%.
This is nothing like written English
A random letter is flat; English is heavily lopsided. E is about 12.7% of the letters in ordinary English text, more than three times its share here. Z runs near 0.07% in text against 3.85% here, so this page hands you a Z around fifty times more often than reading would. Picking letters for a word game will throw up J, Q, X and Z far more often than feels right. That is the generator being fair, not broken.
Repeats arrive sooner than expected
Twenty-six is a small pool, and people underestimate collisions in small pools. Draw a run of letters and the chance two of them match:
| Letters drawn | Chance of a repeat |
|---|---|
| 3 | 11.2% |
| 4 | 21.5% |
| 5 | 33.6% |
| 6 | 46.3% |
| 7 | 58.7% |
| 8 | 69.8% |
By the seventh letter a repeat is more likely than not. Going the other way, seeing all 26 at least once takes about 100 draws.
Why a run of letters often looks unusable
Ask for five letters and there is a 34.4% chance not one is a vowel – a third of the time. Six letters still leaves 27.8%. If you need a set you can build words from, draw the vowels separately.
Related
For a letter chosen from your own shortlist rather than the whole alphabet, paste it into the random picker. For seats, positions and page numbers, use the random number generator.