Character Frequency Analyzer
Count the frequency of each character or word in your text.
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Total Characters: 0Total Words: 0
Character and word frequency analysis
The Characters tab tallies every individual character in your text — letters, digits, punctuation, and whitespace — and ranks them by frequency. Special characters like spaces, newlines, and tabs are labelled for clarity. The Words tab tokenizes your text using a Unicode-aware word pattern (so accented and non-Latin words are counted correctly) and ranks words by how often they appear. Both tables show a visual bar, raw count, and percentage share. Enable Ignore caseto merge "The" and "the" into one entry. Results are capped at the top 50 entries. All analysis runs locally in your browser — nothing is sent to a server.
Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated
What this tool is used for
- Producing a character frequency table for a cipher analysis.
- Finding which character dominates a string unexpectedly.
- Checking a text's distribution against expected language frequencies.
- Spotting an invisible or repeated character by its count.
- Producing a frequency breakdown for a teaching example.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What counts as one character?
- One Unicode code point, and the total counts the same way so the percentages add to 100. An emoji is therefore one entry rather than the two UTF-16 units it occupies — though a multi-part emoji like a skin-toned or joined family sequence still splits, because those genuinely are several code points.
- How are words tokenised?
- By a Unicode-aware pattern: a letter, followed by any run of letters, digits, apostrophes or hyphens. So don't and well-known each count once, accented and non-Latin words are handled properly, and a bare number like 2024 is not a word at all, since a token has to start with a letter.
- Why does Chinese text show one enormous word?
- Because Chinese and Japanese are written without spaces, and every ideograph matches the letter class, so a whole phrase becomes a single token. Proper segmentation of those scripts needs a dictionary, not a pattern. The Characters tab is the useful view for unspaced writing systems.
- Why is the table limited to 50 rows?
- So the page stays readable on a long document, where the tail is a very long list of things appearing once. The cap applies to the copy and download too, so a TSV export is the top 50 rather than the full distribution — worth knowing before treating the file as complete data.
- What is character frequency actually used for?
- Breaking classical ciphers, mostly. Any substitution cipher preserves the frequency profile, so the commonest letter in an English ciphertext is usually E, which appears around 12% of the time, followed by T and A. It is also how compressors choose short codes for common symbols, which is what Huffman coding does.
Common errors and gotchas
- Counting code points rather than visible characters, which differ for emoji and combining sequences.
- Including whitespace in a distribution meant to cover letters only.
- Comparing a short sample against language-wide frequencies, where the sample is far too small.
- Counting case-sensitively when the analysis wanted letters.
- Treating a high count as significant without considering the text's length.
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