Vowel & Consonant Counter
Paste a word, a sentence or a whole text to count its vowels and consonants. You get both totals and their percentage of all letters, plus a count for each of a, e, i, o and u. Tick one box to count Y as a vowel. Free, no sign-up, and nothing is uploaded.
Options
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Vowels
0
Consonants
0%
Vowel share
0%
Consonant share
0
Letters
0
Characters
Per-vowel breakdown
a
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0% of vowels
e
0
0% of vowels
i
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0% of vowels
o
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0% of vowels
u
0
0% of vowels
How to Use the Vowel & Consonant Counter
- Paste or type your text. A single word works as well as a paragraph, and the figures update as you type.
- Decide on Y. The default treats a, e, i, o and u as vowels. Tick Count Y as a vowel to add y to the vowels and take it out of the consonants.
- Read the four headline cards. Vowels, consonants, and each one's percentage of the letters in the text.
- Check the breakdown. Underneath, each vowel has its own count and its share of all the vowels found.
What Is Counted
The counter looks at one character at a time after converting to lower case. A letter from a to z is a vowel if it is in the vowel set and a consonant if it is not. Everything else is ignored: spaces, digits, punctuation, accented letters such as é, and letters from other alphabets. The percentages are shares of the letters it counted, not of the characters in the box, which is shown separately as Characters.
Is Y a Vowel?
It depends on the word, so the tool leaves the choice to you. Y is a consonant in yes and yoga, and a vowel sound in gym, rhythm and happy. A tool that works on letters, not sounds, cannot tell the difference, so when you tick the option every y is counted as a vowel, and when you do not, none is.
| Text | Vowels (Y off) | Vowels (Y on) |
|---|---|---|
| rhythm | 0 | 1 |
| Why try yoga? | 2 | 5 |
| The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog | 11 | 12 |
In Why try yoga?, switching Y on moves the vowels from 2 of 10 letters (20.0%) to 5 of 10 (50.0%), although the y in yoga is pronounced as a consonant. Use the setting that matches your task.
A Worked Example
For The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, with Y off, the counter finds 35 letters: 11 vowels (31.4%) and 24 consonants (68.6%). The per-vowel breakdown is o 4 (36.4% of the vowels), e 3 (27.3%), u 2 (18.2%), and a and i 1 each (9.1%). With Y on, the vowels become 12 (34.3%) and the consonants 23 (65.7%).
In everyday English the vowel letters a, e, i, o and u make up roughly 38% of all letters, going by the widely cited Lewand frequency table. The 31.4% in the example above is below that average, which shows how far a single sentence can stray.
Letters Are Not Sounds
English spelling does not map neatly onto sounds. Queue has four vowel letters but a single vowel sound. This counter reports vowel letters. If you are working on phonics, poetry or syllables, a letter count is a rough guide only, and the Syllable Counter is closer to what you want.
Which Tool Do You Need?
| If you want… | Use |
|---|---|
| The vowel and consonant split | This page |
| A count for every letter A to Z | Letter Frequency Counter |
| Total characters, with or without spaces | Character Counter |
| Syllables in a word or poem | Syllable Counter |
| Words that fit a letter pattern | Word Pattern Finder |
Frequently Asked Questions
- How do I count the vowels in a word?
- Type or paste the word. The Vowels card shows the total and the breakdown shows how many of each vowel there are. For example, education has five vowels: e, u, a, i and o each once.
- Which letters are vowels?
- In English the vowel letters are a, e, i, o and u, and sometimes y. This counter uses a, e, i, o and u by default and adds y when you tick the box.
- What counts as a consonant here?
- Consonants are defined here as the letters a to z that are not vowels. Spaces, numbers, punctuation and accented or non-Latin letters are not counted, so they cannot inflate the consonant total.
- Does the counter handle accented letters?
- No. Only a to z are recognised, so é is skipped rather than counted as a vowel. Remove accents first if you need them included, for example with the Accent & Diacritic Remover.
- What is the average vowel percentage in English?
- About 38% of letters in typical English text are the vowel letters a, e, i, o and u. Individual texts range quite widely, and a single word or a short sentence can be far from this.
- Is my text uploaded?
- No. The letters are counted in your browser and nothing is sent or stored.