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Measured
Which forms Amharic actually writes
Every consonant has seven forms. They are not written equally often. This page is a count of 62,838,367 characters of Amharic, register by register, saying how often each of the seven is used.
ቆጠራ
Two of the seven carry most of the writing
In news prose the sixth order is 36.4% of every character written, and the first is 30.5%. Between them, 66.9%. The other five share what is left.
The rarest is the 5th, at 2.1% — a few characters in a page of Amharic.
| Order | Share |
|---|---|
| ሰግዕዝGe'ez | 30.5% |
| ሱካዕብKa'ib | 4.5% |
| ሲሣልስSalis | 5.2% |
| ሳራብዕRabi' | 16.4% |
| ሴኃምስHamis | 2.1% |
| ስሳድስSadis | 36.4% |
| ሶሳብዕSabi' | 4.6% |
Why this decides a keyboard
A phonetic keyboard rests on one decision: which form a bare consonant gives you. That form costs no extra key; the other one costs a key every time. So the question is which of the two is written more often — and that is a question about the language, not about taste.
On this layout, typing Amharic costs 1.66 keystrokes per character — measured over the news register, not estimated.
Three kinds of text, counted separately
There is no single “Amharic” figure. The ratio is a property of the text you sample, so these were counted separately rather than one being picked as representative. An encyclopaedia is thick with proper nouns and loanwords, scripture is morphologically conservative, and news is the closest of the three to the language people write to one another.
| Text | Characters | 1st | 6th | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NewsAn Amharic News Text Classification Dataset | 54,006,442 | 30.5% | 36.4% | +5.9 |
| EncyclopaediaAmharic Wikipedia, from the Wikimedia dump | 8,445,767 | 28.3% | 38.3% | +10.0 |
| ScriptureThe Amharic Bible, from eBible.org | 386,158 | 29.1% | 42.1% | +13.0 |
What this count does not say
What was counted is published writing, not what anybody typed. Messages, names and everyday correspondence are not in it. The figures say how Amharic is written; they do not say what one person types in a day.
The texts themselves are not published here — there is no right to redistribute them. What is published is the result, with the day it was counted and the three sources named.
Counted on 2026-09-07.
The rule itself
How the seven forms work, and which key gives which, is on the layout page. The whole chart is on the alphabet page.