The first letter
She then analyzed the frequency count of letters by their position in the word. While vowels occur more frequently in words, it’s rare for them to be the first letter with only a appearing in the top 10. Instead, she finds that b, p and m, which don’t occur with high frequency (neither is in the top 15 for frequency) are all in the top seven for the opening letter. The three letters form what are called “bilabial” sounds, because they involve two (bi) lips (labial) coming together.
Peters explains, “It seems that English likes starting words with bilabial sounds. This makes sense, since we start speaking with two lips together.”
The fifth letter
While bilabials are common as the first letter, we often find that the fifth letter is usually what are called “alveolar” sounds (so called, because they involve the tongue moving up to the alveolar ridge which is the ridge just behind your teeth at the top of your mouth) which includes the letters t, r, d, l, n, s. She says the reason for this is, “maybe because it takes very little energy to create an alveolar sound compared to bilabials.”
The second letter
The second position is dominated by vowels, with close to 60 per cent of the second letter comprised of vowels. She also notices the high frequency of c in the opening letter because it is commonly used in digraphs (ch) and in consonant clusters to start words (cl, cr) and to end words (ck, ch). This is also why h is more likely to appear as the second or final letter as a result of words beginning and ending with English digraphs: ch, gh, ph, sh, th.
The fourth letter
She also notes that e is the most common fourth letter because plenty of English words end with e followed by an alveolar: er, en, el, ed.
Aa for syllable structure? Peters says, “Many five-letter words are a single syllable long. Syllables are structured with a vowel component at the heart and then consonants that then attach to that vowel for the purposes of articulation — you can’t speak without vowels.”
Consonants that surface in front of the vowel nucleus are called “onset” consonants, while those that surface after the vowel nucleus are called “coda” consonants.
She adds, “English has one of the most liberal syllable structure systems in the world that allows for large groups of consonants to cluster together in onset and/or in coda position. In English, we can have up to three consonants in onset position and up to five consonants in coda position (at least in the spelling system) – the word str-e-ngths demonstrates the extent of this type of clustering.”