The commonest single ending in Sanskrit is the accusative singular of the largest class of nouns, and it consists of a short vowel and this consonant. Every direct object of every transitive verb in the language carries it, along with the whole of the neuter nominative and accusative of the same class, so a Sanskrit sentence is dense with the sound in a way that few other consonants match. The first person singular of a large class of verbs ends in it too, and so does a substantial family of nominal suffixes.
A nasal at the end of a word before a pause is made at the lips, and in the writing of Sanskrit that final nasal is normally marked with the anusvara, a dot placed above the line, rather than with this letter. The sound is the same; the sign is different. So the letter is written less often than the sound occurs, and a count of the letter in a text would badly understate how much work it does.
The letter is also frequent inside words, in ordinary vocabulary and in the roots meaning to measure, to think and to die, and it is among the most often cut signs in any Brahmi inscription. Its shape is one of the simpler forms in the script and can be followed with little change into several of the descendant alphabets.