Letter Counter
Count the frequency of each letter in your text.
Input text
Unique Letters: 0Total Letters: 0
Letter frequency analysis
Letter frequency analysis counts how often each letter appears — a foundational technique in cryptanalysis, linguistics, and readability research. In English, E, T, A, O, I, N are the most common letters (hence the ETAOIN SHRDLU typesetters' mnemonic). The pangram sample above — “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” — contains all 26 letters at least once, so it makes a good test for font character sets. For word-level frequency, try the Word Frequency Counter.
Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated
What this tool is used for
- Counting letter frequency for a cipher or a puzzle.
- Checking a text's letter distribution against expected English frequencies.
- Finding which letters a passage over-uses.
- Producing a frequency table for a teaching example.
- Checking whether a pangram uses every letter.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What counts as a letter?
- Unicode letter categories (\p{L}), so accented Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and CJK all count. An [a-zA-Z] filter would report zero for a Russian document — which is the bug most naive counters ship with.
- Why does the count differ from my word processor's?
- Because "characters" is ambiguous. Word counts every character including spaces and punctuation; a letter count excludes them. Neither is wrong — they answer different questions, and the difference on a page of prose is roughly 20%.
- How are emoji counted?
- Not as letters — they are Unicode symbols, not letter category. They do count toward a total character tally, where a family emoji can be seven code points but one visible character, so the numbers legitimately disagree.
- Is letter frequency useful?
- Yes, for cryptanalysis and language identification. English runs roughly E 12.7%, T 9.1%, A 8.2% — deviation from that profile is what breaks a substitution cipher, and is how language detectors make a first guess.
- Why would I need a letter count specifically?
- Crossword and puzzle construction, character-limited fields that exclude spaces, linguistic analysis, and checking a name fits a fixed-width field. For social limits you want a character count, which includes spaces.
- Should the count include or exclude spaces?
- State which — both are used, and publishers commonly specify "characters including spaces" because it maps to typeset length. A limit quoted without saying which can differ by 15-20% on ordinary prose.
- How are ligatures counted?
- As however many code points they occupy — `fi` as one precomposed ligature counts once, while `f` plus `i` counts twice, and they look identical. Normalising to NFKC before counting makes the two agree.
Common errors and gotchas
- Counting case-sensitively when the analysis wants letters rather than characters.
- Including digits and punctuation in what is meant to be a letter count.
- Ignoring accented characters, which either vanish or count as separate letters.
- Comparing a short passage against language-wide frequencies, where the sample is far too small.
- Assuming the counts are letters when the tool counted code points.
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