According to the English for Students website, j, q, and z occur the least if you analyze the frequency of each letter in the entries of the 11th Concise Oxford Dictionary.
As you can probably guess, the letter Z is the least commonly used letter in the English alphabet. (In American English, this letter is pronounced “zee.”) The letter Q is the second least commonly used letter. In English words, Q is almost always followed by the letter U.
Why did Z get removed from the alphabet? Around 300 BC, the Roman Censor Appius Claudius Caecus removed Z from the alphabet. His justification was that Z had become archaic: the pronunciation of /z/ had become /r/ by a process called rhotacism, rendering the letter Z useless.
In English, ⟨j⟩ is the fourth least frequently used letter in words, being more frequent only than ⟨z⟩, ⟨q⟩, and ⟨x⟩.
Q without U is used to represent sounds not often found in English but typical in Semitic languages. Loan words such as Qur'an and Iraq are examples of Q's guttural /k/ sound. (Want to learn more about loanwords?
The rarest letters in English are j, q, x, and z.
The Classical Latin alphabet had fewer letters than we do today (for example U and V used to be one and the same), and Q was used as an alternative to C and K in certain situations. Latin orthography dictated that a Q should be followed by a U, and the habit stuck, making QU a common digraph.
In most English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom, the letter's name is zed /zɛd/, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (this dates to Latin, which borrowed Y and Z from Greek), but in American English its name is zee /ziː/, ...
Zed is widely known to be used in British English. But it's also used in almost every English-speaking country. In England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, India, Canada (usually), and New Zealand, Z is pronounced as zed. It's derived from the Greek letter zeta.
Zed is the name of the letter Z. The pronunciation zed is more commonly used in Canadian English than zee. English speakers in other Commonwealth countries also prefer the pronunciation zed.
You may find that in some font styles the number '7' resembles the letter 'T'. Occasionally, you may also be able to use the number '7' as a 'Y'.
w. the 23rd letter of the English alphabet. W is a consonant.
Saqqara (an ancient burial ground in Egypt) is a proper noun notable for its use of a double Q.
The modern letter "J" settled on its current English pronunciation only around 500 years ago; in Ancient Hebrew, the first consonant of the Tetragrammaton always represents a "Y" sound.
The letter 'I' was called 'yod' in 1000 BC. It meant hand and arm. The Greeks called it 'iota' and made it vertical. In its evolution, it turned into a straight line around 700 BC.
Like J, X, Q, and Z, the letter K is not used very frequently in English. It is the fifth least frequently used letter in the English language, with a frequency in words of about 0.8%.