Why S Starts More Words Than Any Other Letter

Every print dictionary I own bulges in the same place, about two-thirds of the way through. That bulge is S. Of the 168,551 words in our collection, 18,680 begin with S — better than one word in every nine. No other letter comes close, and the reasons why are a neat little tour of how English builds its vocabulary.

The big shelves

Here is the top of the table, each chip a live list:

S wins for two stacked reasons. First, it is the only letter that clusters so freely: sc-, sh-, sk-, sl-, sm-, sn-, sp-, squ-, st-, sw- are all legal openings, so S effectively runs ten shelves where most letters run one. Second, the runners-up owe their bulk to prefixes — C carries con- and com-, P carries pre-, pro- and per- — and S has its own (sub-, super-, semi-) on top of the clusters. Wiktionary’s appendix of English prefixes is the parts catalogue, if you want to see the machine that stocked those shelves.

S doesn’t start more words because it’s louder. It starts more words because it plays well with others.

The thin shelves

Down at the other end, the shelves get lonely. X opens just 135 words, nearly all of them Greek borrowings that sound like laboratory equipment. Z opens 531, Y only 547, and even famously difficult Q manages 805. A letter’s trouble is a browser’s delight, though — the thin lists are the fastest way to learn a whole opening letter cold, and they are full of words you can actually deploy.

What the skew is worth

If you play word games, first-letter frequency is quiet leverage. In a crossword, an S at the front of an unsolved entry is the least informative letter you can have — the candidate list stays enormous — while an X or Z at the front practically solves the word for you. The same logic runs in any guessing game: rare openers collapse possibilities, common openers barely narrow them. Knowing which is which is the whole trick, and the A-to-Z lists are the reference table.

Sources & further reading

• Wiktionary — Appendix: English prefixes — the affix machinery that stacked the S, C and P shelves.
• Merriam-Webster — where you can feel the S bulge in the page count yourself.