Nasty riddle.

Hi Fred, first off we need to find out the answer to the question:


"What is the frequency of the letters of the alphabet in English?"

The inventor of Morse code, Samuel Morse (1791-1872), needed to know this so that he could give the simplest codes to the most frequently used letters. He did it simply by counting the number of letters in sets of printers' type. The figures he came up with were:

12,000 E
9,000 T
8,000 A, I, N, O, S
6,400 H
6,200 R
4,400 D
4,000 L
3,400 U
3,000 C,
2,500 F
2,000 W, Y
1,700 G, P
1,600 B
1,200 V
800 K
500 Q
400 J, X
M 200 Z

However, this gives the frequency of letters in English text, which is dominated by a relatively small number of common words.
What are the commonest English words?

The only way to measure this is to analyse a large collection (or 'corpus') of texts, but lists based on different collections (or 'corpora') tend to disagree about even the top ten words in English. A rough top thirty might look something like this:

the
of
and
a
to
in
is
that
it
was
he
for
as
on
with
his
be
at
you
I
are
this
by
from
had
have
they
not
or
one

Therefore, a keyboard system of ?'NLATW' Move 1right, 1r, 2 Left, 2l =MAKE.

Of cause there a number of other possibilities. Good luck