Benford's Law and First Letter of Word

TL;DR

This paper introduces a universal First-Letter Law (FLL) that predicts the distribution of first letters in words, similar to Benford's law for digits, and demonstrates its applicability to English literature.

Contribution

The paper derives the First-Letter Law (FLL), a universal law predicting first letter distributions in words based on alphabet size, analogous to Benford's law.

Findings

FLL accurately predicts letter distribution in English texts.

On average, 16% of words start with 't' in English.

FLL's applicability extends to various languages and texts.

Abstract

A universal First-Letter Law (FLL) is derived and described. It predicts the percentages of first letters for words in novels. The FLL is akin to Benford's law (BL) of first digits, which predicts the percentages of first digits in a data collection of numbers. Both are universal in the sense that FLL only depends on the numbers of letters in the alphabet, whereas BL only depends on the number of digits in the base of the number system. The existence of these types of universal laws appears counter-intuitive. Nonetheless both describe data very well. Relations to some earlier works are given. FLL predicts that an English author on the average starts about 16 out of 100 words with the English letter `t'. This is corroborated by data, yet an author can freely write anything. Fuller implications and the applicability of FLL remain for the future.