mySQL find most common starting letter for values - mysql

Question

From a mySQL table I would like to determine the most frequent starting letter; for example if the list is:
day
book
cat
dog
apple
The expected result would ultimately allow me to determine that:
'd' is the most frequent starting letter
'd' has a count of 2
Is there a way to do this without running 26 queries, e.g.:
WHERE myWord LIKE 'a%'
WHERE myWord LIKE 'b%'
...
WHERE myWord LIKE 'y%'
WHERE myWord LIKE 'z%'
I found this SO question which makes me think I can do this in 2 steps:
If I'm not mistaken the approach would be to first build a list of all the first letters using the approach from this SO Answer something like this:
SELECT DISTINCT LEFT(word_name, 1) as letter, word_name
FROM word
GROUP BY (letter)
ORDER BY letter
which I expect would look something like:
a
b
c
d
d
... and then query that list. To do this I would store that new list as a temporary table as per this SO question, something like:
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE IF NOT EXISTS table2 AS (SELECT * FROM table1)
and query that for Magnitude as per this SO question, something like.
SELECT column, COUNT(*) AS magnitude
FROM table
GROUP BY column
ORDER BY magnitude DESC
LIMIT 1
Is this a sensible approach?
NOTE:
As sometimes happens, in writing this question I think I figured out a way forward, as yet I have no working code. I'll update the question later with code that either works or which needs help.
In the meanwhile I appreciate any feedback, pointers, proposed answers.
Finally, I'm using PHP, PDO, mySQL for this.
TIA
For what it's worth there was an easier way, this is what I ended up with thanks to both who took the time to answer:
$stmt_common2 = $pdo->prepare('SELECT COUNT(*) as occurence,SUBSTRING(word,1,1) as letter
FROM words
GROUP BY SUBSTRING(word,1,1)
ORDER BY occurence DESC, letter ASC
LIMIT 1');
$stmt_common2->execute();
$mostCommon2 = $stmt_common2->fetchAll();
echo "most common letter: " . $mostCommon2[0]['letter'] . " occurs " . $mostCommon2[0]['occurence'] . " times)<br>";

Answer 1

You can achieve by using this simple query
SELECT COUNT(*) as occurence,SUBSTRING(word_name,1,1) as letter
FROM word
GROUP BY SUBSTRING(word_name,1,1)
ORDER BY occurence DESC, letter ASC
LIMIT 1