Letter Counter

Count how many times a specific letter appears in your text, or a word, a punctuation mark, a digit or an emoji. Count several at once, and every match is highlighted in the text so you can see exactly where they are. Nothing is uploaded.

Separate several targets with commas. To count a comma itself, leave the field as a single comma.

0 Letters
0 Vowels
0 Consonants
0 Digits
0 Uppercase
0 Characters

Counted on your own device. Your text is never sent to us.

Counting one letter is easy enough to do by eye in a sentence and impossible by eye in a page, which is the whole reason this tool exists. Type the letter, read the number, and see every occurrence marked in the text so you can go straight to them.

Most letter counters stop at one letter at a time, A to Z only. This one counts several targets at once so you can compare them, and a target can be a word, a pair of letters, a punctuation mark, a digit or an emoji rather than only a letter. The full frequency table underneath ranks every character in your text against the usual distribution of English, which is the view you want for a crossword, a word game or a substitution cipher.

What this letter counter does

Count any letter you choose

Type the letter you want and the count appears as you type, with the share of the text it accounts for. The obvious job, done without ceremony.

Count several at once

Separate your targets with commas and each is counted and listed side by side. Comparing how often you reach for one word against another is the question people usually have, and one-at-a-time tools cannot answer it.

Not just letters

A word, a pair of letters, a punctuation mark, a digit, an accented character or an emoji all work. If you can type it, it can be counted.

See where every match is

Each occurrence is highlighted in the text itself, which you can still edit. A number tells you there are nine; the highlight shows you which nine and lets you change them.

Whole words when you want them

Searching for "cat" finds it inside "concatenate" unless you ask for whole words only. Case sensitivity is a separate switch, so you can look for a capital A without matching every lowercase one.

The full frequency table

Every character ranked by how often it appears, with its percentage and a bar, next to the expected frequency for English. This is the view you want for a cipher, a crossword or a word game.

What people count letters for

Word games and puzzles

Checking which letters a word uses, how many vowels are left, or which letters are common enough to guess first. The frequency table ranks every letter in your text, and the English comparison shows which are over or under represented.

Ciphers and frequency analysis

A substitution cipher preserves letter frequency, which is what breaks it. Paste the ciphertext, read the ranking, and line the most common symbols up against E, T and A.

Catching a word you overuse

Count "just", "really", "actually" and "very" in one go and see which crutch you lean on. Each occurrence is highlighted, so you can go straight to them.

Teaching phonics and spelling

Count the vowels in a passage, show how often a letter pair such as "th" or "ing" appears, or compare a child's writing against the usual distribution of English.

Checking data and code

Count delimiters, quotes, brackets or tabs in a block of text. Regular expression characters are matched literally, so searching for a full stop finds full stops rather than every character.

Names, titles and constrained writing

Lipograms, tongue twisters and alliteration all depend on how often a letter appears. So does checking that a name or a title avoids a letter entirely.

Letter frequency in English

How often each letter appears in ordinary English text. These are the conventional figures used in puzzle and cipher work; different corpora disagree in the first decimal place, so treat them as a guide rather than a measurement.

1 E 12.70%
2 T 9.06%
3 A 8.17%
4 O 7.51%
5 I 6.97%
6 N 6.75%
7 S 6.33%
8 H 6.09%
9 R 5.99%
10 D 4.25%
11 L 4.03%
12 C 2.78%
13 U 2.76%
14 M 2.41%
15 W 2.36%
16 F 2.23%
17 G 2.02%
18 Y 1.97%
19 P 1.93%
20 B 1.49%
21 V 0.98%
22 K 0.77%
23 J 0.15%
24 X 0.15%
25 Q 0.10%
26 Z 0.07%

Letter counter questions

How do I count how many times a specific letter appears?

Paste your text into the box, then type the letter into the search field above it. The count appears immediately, along with the percentage of the text that letter accounts for, and every occurrence is highlighted so you can see where they are.

Can I count more than one letter at a time?

Yes. Separate them with commas, for example a, e, i, o, u, and each is counted and listed separately. This is the main thing single-letter tools cannot do, and it is usually what people actually want.

Can I count a word or a phrase rather than a letter?

Yes. Anything you can type works: a word, a pair of letters such as th or ing, a punctuation mark, a digit, an accented character or an emoji. Turn on whole words only if you want "cat" to skip "concatenate".

Does it tell the difference between capital and lowercase?

By default no, so searching for a finds both a and A, which is what most people expect. Switch on case sensitive and the two are counted separately.

How are overlapping matches counted?

They are not double counted. Searching for aa in aaaa gives two matches rather than three, which is the convention every search box follows. Each match is highlighted once.

What is the most common letter in English?

E, by a wide margin, at roughly 12.7 per cent of letters, followed by T at about 9.1 and A at about 8.2. The least common are Q and Z, each well under half a per cent. The reference table on this page lists all twenty six, and the tool compares your own text against them. Different corpora disagree slightly, so treat the figures as conventional rather than exact.

How do I count vowels and consonants?

They are counted for you as soon as you paste anything, alongside letters, digits, spaces and everything else. Vowels here means a, e, i, o and u; y is counted as a consonant, because whether it is a vowel depends on the word.

Does it handle accented letters and emoji?

Yes. An accented letter such as é is counted as itself, and case folding still works, so searching for e does not match it. Emoji are counted as single characters rather than as the two or more code units a naive counter reports.

Can I use it for frequency analysis of a cipher?

That is what the frequency table is for. Paste the ciphertext and every character is ranked by how often it appears, with percentages and a bar, beside the expected English frequency. In a simple substitution cipher the ranking survives encryption, which is the weakness that breaks it.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. Everything is counted in your browser by local JavaScript. Your text is never sent to our server, never written to a database and never passed to any third party or AI service. Disconnect from the internet and it still works.

The free word counter and text analyzer covers words, characters, sentences, reading time and the phrases you repeat, with sixteen counting rules you can switch on and off.

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