Letter Frequency Counter
Paste any text and get a table of every letter it uses, with the count, the percentage of all letters and a bar for each. Sort by frequency or alphabetically, and switch on case sensitivity when capitals matter. It is the quickest way to run a frequency analysis on a cipher or to check a puzzle. Free, no sign-up, and nothing is uploaded.
Options
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Letters
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Characters
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Distinct letters
How to Use the Letter Frequency Counter
- Paste your text. Plain prose, a ciphertext, a puzzle grid or a word list. The table updates as you type.
- Pick a sort order. Sort by frequency to see the most common letter first, with ties broken alphabetically, or sort alphabetically to compare with a reference table.
- Choose case handling. By default H and h count as the same letter. Tick Case-sensitive to list capitals separately.
- Read the table. Each letter shows its count, its percentage of all letters and a bar scaled to the most common one. The cards give total letters, total characters and distinct letters.
What Is Counted
Only the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet, a to z and A to Z, are counted. Digits, spaces, punctuation and accented letters such as é or ñ are ignored, as are letters from other scripts. The percentage is each letter's share of the letters counted, not of all characters, so spaces and punctuation do not dilute it. Only the letters that appear are listed; absent letters get no row.
A Worked Example
The sentence The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog has 43 characters and 35 letters, and uses all 26 letters. The counter lists:
| Letter | Count | Share of letters |
|---|---|---|
| o | 4 | 11.4% |
| e | 3 | 8.6% |
| h, r, t, u | 2 each | 5.7% |
| the other 20 letters | 1 each | 2.9% |
That is far from the usual English pattern, because a sentence built to contain every letter once is not typical prose. A longer, natural text settles towards the known distribution.
Letter Frequencies in English
In ordinary English text, E is the most common letter, followed by T, A, O, I, N, S, H and R. A widely cited table based on Robert Lewand's Cryptological Mathematics (2000) gives E about 12.7%, T 9.1%, A 8.2%, O 7.5%, I 7.0%, N 6.7%, S 6.3%, H 6.1% and R 6.0%, while Z, Q, X and J are each below 0.2%. Treat these as typical rather than exact: they vary with the text, and short samples vary a lot.
- Cipher breaking. In a simple substitution cipher each plaintext letter maps to one ciphertext letter, so the most common ciphertext letter is probably E or T. This is frequency analysis, a method the Arab scholar al-Kindi described in the ninth century.
- Caesar and shift ciphers. Find the most frequent ciphertext letter, assume it is E and count back to get the shift. Try the Caesar Cipher Encoder & Decoder to apply it.
- Games and puzzles. Word-game players use letter counts to judge how likely a letter is to be left on the board, or to check a custom puzzle.
- Keyboard layouts. Layouts such as Dvorak were designed around how often each letter is typed.
Which Tool Do You Need?
| If you want… | Use |
|---|---|
| How often each letter appears | This page |
| Only the vowel and consonant split | Vowel & Consonant Counter |
| Total characters, with or without spaces | Character Counter |
| How often each word appears | Word Frequency Counter |
| To decode a substitution cipher | Substitution Cipher Solver |
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the most common letter in English?
- E, at about 12.7% of letters in typical text, followed by T (about 9.1%) and A (about 8.2%). The order ETAOIN SHRDLU is a traditional shorthand for the most frequent letters, and it varies by text.
- How does letter frequency analysis break a cipher?
- In a substitution cipher each plaintext letter always becomes the same ciphertext letter, so the pattern of letter counts survives. Matching the most common ciphertext letters to E, T, A and O gives a first guess that you then refine using common words.
- Why are some letters missing from my table?
- The table lists only letters present in your text. If you expected a letter with an accent, note that accented letters and non-Latin scripts are not counted.
- What does the case-sensitive option do?
- Off by default, so capital and lower-case forms of a letter are added together. Switch it on to list H and h as separate rows, for example when checking capitalisation in a cipher.
- Is the percentage out of all characters or only letters?
- Only letters. Spaces, digits and punctuation are left out of the denominator, so the percentages for the letters you see add up to 100%.
- Is my text uploaded?
- No. The letters are counted in your browser and nothing is sent or stored.