Statistics of English useful in breaking ciphers

 

  * Single letter frequencies: ETAOIN SHRDLU...

 

 

  * Common word frequencies: the, to, of, i, a, and, is, that...

   

  * Letter pair frequencies, "bigrams": th, in, he, er, re, on, es, ... %

   

 

  * Adjacent triples, "trigrams"

    the , ing , tha , and , hat , ion