On a word that means nothing

counting the letters of a name

31 October 2026

Above all else show the data.

— Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

It’s a word from an imaginary language in a song called Forgotten Love. I chose it because there was nothing to explain, and then found that a word with no meaning still has a shape.Drawn, not typed, in the manner of the marks in Kuwayama, Trademarks & Symbols, 1973. Here it is in the constructed letters I use for the name.

Figure 1. The wordmark. Stems, semicircles and true circles only.

The name has eleven letters and only seven of them differ. The letter i takes four of the eleven places, and its running count climbs like thisA sparkline, in Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence, 2006, is a word-sized graphic. across the word: 4. The word opens and closes on f, which is why the mark can be two of them, one turned about the centre.

Every letter on one scale

Small multiples repeat one small design, so the eye compares the data and not the drawings.An unnumbered note for an aside that needs no number. Each panel below counts one letter from the first position to the last.

Figure 2. Running count of each letter across the eleven positions of the name, on one shared scale. Only i keeps rising.

The exact values

A table is better when the exact number matters.

Table 1. The letters by count.
Letter	Count	Share
i	4	36.4%
f	2	18.2%
l	1	9.1%
n	1	9.1%
o	1	9.1%
r	1	9.1%
s	1	9.1%

Figure 3. The same i, wider, with a band over counts one to three.

The counting takes a few lines, and nothing here runs in your browser. The cumulativeLetterCounts function draws every chart on this page when the site is built:

const counts = {};
for (const letter of "firilisinof") {
  counts[letter] = (counts[letter] ?? 0) + 1;
}

The page itself follows Tufte’s layout: a text column and a margin beside it.

Every letter on one scale

The exact values

See also