Character Frequency Counter
Count the characters, words, sentences and unique characters in your text and see its most common letters, bigrams and trigrams with percentages. How it works
Use the Character Frequency Counter
About the Character Frequency Counter
Paste text to get its character, word and sentence counts, its characters without white space and its unique characters, and its 15 most common letters, bigrams and trigrams, each with a count and a percentage. "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. It barked! Mr. Smith paid $3.14 for e.g. cake." has 91 characters, 18 words and 3 sentences, and e leads its 63 letters with 6 (9.5%).
Top letters in the sample sentence
| Letter | Count | Share of the 63 letters |
|---|---|---|
| e | 6 | 9.5% |
| o | 5 | 7.9% |
| r | 5 | 7.9% |
| a | 4 | 6.3% |
| i | 4 | 6.3% |
| t | 4 | 6.3% |
Sample: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. It barked! Mr. Smith paid $3.14 for e.g. cake. Ties are listed in alphabetical order, and the shares are rounded to one decimal as the page shows them.
Bigrams in "the cat the hat", with and without whitespace
| Setting | Windows counted | Top bigrams |
|---|---|---|
| Include whitespace off (default) | 8 | at 2, he 2, th 2, ca 1 |
| Include whitespace on | 14 | at 2, e␠ 2, he 2, th 2 |
A window is two consecutive characters. With whitespace on, ␠ stands for a space.
How to use this tool
- Type or paste text into the box, or load the prose or code sample.
- Read the character, word and sentence counts, then the top letters, bigrams and trigrams.
- Tick Case-sensitive letters or Include whitespace in n-grams to change the analysis, and press Copy analysis to copy the counts as text.
Frequently asked questions
- How does it count sentences?
- A sentence ends at a full stop, exclamation mark or question mark that is followed by whitespace or the end of the text. A run such as "..." counts once, and a dot inside "3.14" or after "Mr", "Dr" or "e.g" does not end one. "Pi is 3.14. Next? Yes... ok" counts 4 sentences: the last one has no end mark and counts as one. Blank text has 0.
- What is the most common letter in English?
- E. Robert Lewand’s counts of a long English corpus, as reported on Wikipedia’s letter-frequency page, put E at 12.7% of letters. A short text strays from that: e is 9.5% of the sample sentence. For every letter of your text, not just the top 15, use the Letter Frequency Counter.
- What are bigrams and trigrams, and do spaces count?
- They are windows of 2 and 3 consecutive characters. By default no window crosses a space, tab or line break, so "the cat the hat" has 8 bigram windows. With Include whitespace in n-grams ticked, whitespace is a character like any other and the same text has 14 windows, with "e␠" among the top bigrams.
- Does it count digits and punctuation, and is it case-sensitive?
- Characters counts everything, and the All characters table under Character counts lists every visible character with digits and punctuation. Top letters lists letters only, in any script and not just A to Z, so digits and punctuation do not appear there but do appear in bigrams and trigrams. By default A and a are one letter. With Case-sensitive letters ticked they are separate: "Aa Bb a" gives a 3 and b 2 by default, and a 2, A 1, B 1, b 1 when case-sensitive.
- How many unique characters are in my text?
- The Character counts panel shows it. Unique counts each different visible character once, as typed, so A and a are two and white space is left out. "Hello, World!" has 13 characters: 12 without white space, 1 white-space character and 9 unique, with l 3 times and o twice. Open All characters for each one with its count and its share of the characters without white space.
- Is there a size limit, and is my text saved?
- Text over 100,000 characters shows a message and no counts. The text and the two switches are saved in this browser, and Clear Saved Values removes them.
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