Letter Counter and Frequency Analyzer

Analyze letter frequency with counts and percentages. Visualize character distribution and find the most used letters.

Letter Counter and Frequency Analyzer tool

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Example

Input: Hello World

Result: Letters 10, Unique Letters 7, Whitespace 1; top letters L 3 (30.0%), O 2 (20.0%), then H, E, W, R, D 1 each (10.0%)

Letters are counted case-insensitively and each percentage is the letter count divided by the 10 letters in the text.

  1. Paste or type the text you want to analyze.
  2. Read the frequency list, which shows each letter with its count and percentage.
  3. Check the summary cards for letters, unique letters, digits, whitespace and special characters.
  4. Use the bar next to each letter to spot the most and least common ones.
  5. Edit the text and the counts update at once, so you can compare passages.

Letter Frequency Analysis Explained

The Letter Counter shows how often each letter appears in your text, with a count, a percentage and a bar for each one. The list runs from the most common letter to the least. In "Hello World", for example, L comes first with 3 (30%), then O with 2 (20%).

Capital and small letters count as the same letter, so A and a are added together. Percentages are based on letters only. Digits, spaces and punctuation are left out and shown on their own cards. Accented letters and other alphabets count as separate letters, so é and ñ get their own rows, and Greek or Cyrillic text works as well.

Frequency analysis is the oldest trick for breaking simple codes. In a Caesar or substitution cipher, each letter is swapped for another. But the pattern of how often letters appear stays the same. In long English text, E is usually the most common letter, followed by T and A. If the most common letter in a coded message is H, the key is probably a shift of 3. You can test that idea with the Text Encoder and Decoder.

Writers and teachers use it too, for example to check a lipogram, which is text written without a certain letter, or to show how letter use differs between languages. For word and sentence counts, use the Word Counter.

Frequently Asked Questions

E. In typical English text it makes up roughly 12 to 13 percent of all letters, followed by T, A, O, I and N. Short texts can differ a lot from this pattern, so a single sentence may have a different winner. The longer your sample, the closer it gets to the usual order.
No. The tool is case-insensitive, so "A" and "a" are counted together and shown once in the list. That is what you want for cipher work and language study, where the case of a letter does not change which letter it is.
Each letter count is divided by the total number of letters, then multiplied by 100. In "Hello World" there are 10 letters and three of them are L, so L shows 30.0%. Spaces, digits and punctuation are not part of the total, so the letter percentages always add up to 100.
Anything that is not a letter, a digit or whitespace. That includes punctuation, symbols such as @ and %, and emoji. A simple emoji counts as one special character, while one built from several parts, such as a flag, counts as more than one.

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