A is the second most common letter in the English language (only E is found more frequently in dictionary entries), but there’s one surprising place you won’t find a single A: the numbers 1 to 999.
If you were to sit down and write out each of those many numbers, the first time you would write an A is when you reached 1,000 (one thousand). You won’t find an A in the numbers 1–19, nor any multiple of 10, nor in the spelling of 100. If you expand the range to include 0, you won’t find an A there, either.
Of course, some might argue that this isn’t entirely true. Most people write out 101 as “one hundred and one” rather than “one hundred one,” and the word “and” obviously contains an A. But if you only consider numeral words and leave out “and,” you’ll bypass any mention of A.
While A makes its first appearance in the spelling of “thousand,” you’ll have to bypass the first 999,999,999 numbers to get to the first use of the letter B, when it appears for the first time in the word “billion.” Even more surprisingly, you won’t find the letter C until you reach “octillion.”
A surprising lack of A:
- Interestingly, you’ll find all other vowels in those first 999 numbers, including a huge number of Y’s (think about all the numbers that include twenty, thirty, forty, etc.). Even the relatively uncommon letter X makes over 200 appearances in the first thousand numbers, due to the high frequency of numbers containing “six,” “sixty,” and “sixteen.”
- Based on an analysis of the 240,000 entries in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, “E” is the most common letter in the English language, appearing in approximately 11% of entries. In second place, “A” features in just under 8.5% of words. R, I, O, T, N, S, L, and C round out the rest of the top 10.
- Unlike the first 999 numbers on the number line, A is very commonly found in the names of U.S. states; in fact, it is the most frequently used letter, appearing 61 times. Q is the only letter not to appear in any state name.
- Writing out the first thousand numbers in other languages has a very different result. In the major Romance languages of French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, you’ll find an “A” in each of the corresponding words for the number four: “quatre,” “quattro,” “cuatro,” “quatro,” and “patru,” respectively. In German, you’ll find an A in “acht,” meaning eight.
