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Letter Frequency Counter

Count how often each letter appears in any text and its share of all letters, against English, French, German, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese averages. How it works

Use the Letter Frequency Counter

Letters counted
Enter text to count letters
Different — · Most common —

Averages for a to z come from Lewand, Cryptological Mathematics (2000); accented letters have no average.

Letters are listed as counted: lower case, with ı and i, or σ and ς, as different letters.

Frequency Distribution

Enter text to see letter frequency.

About the Letter Frequency Counter

Letter frequency is each letter's count divided by the number of letters in the text, times 100. Hello, World has 10 letters, so l, which appears 3 times, has a share of 30.0%. The counter lists every letter by count, most frequent first, in any alphabet; digits, spaces, punctuation and emoji are not counted. Beside each letter a to z it shows the average for English, French, German, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese, and the difference.

What counts as a letter

TextLetters countedDifferent lettersWhy
Hello, World107The comma and the space are left out
café44é is one letter, whether typed as one character or as e plus an accent
İstanbul88İ counts as i
Straße66ß is a letter of its own
Привет66Cyrillic letters count
ı i22Dotless ı and i are different letters
123 ?? 😀00No letters: the page says none were found

Frequently asked questions

What is the most common letter in English and other languages?
E. In the table of English text frequencies that Wikipedia takes from Robert Lewand, E makes up 12.7% of letters, then T 9.1%, A 8.2%, O 7.5% and I 7.0%, and Z is the rarest at 0.074%. In the other languages the page compares with, E also leads in French (14.7%), German (16.4%), Spanish (13.7%) and Italian (11.8%, just ahead of A at 11.7%), while A leads in Portuguese (14.6%). A short text can differ a lot: in The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog the most common letter is o, 4 of 35 letters (11.4%).
How is the letter frequency percentage calculated?
Count ÷ letters counted × 100, shown to one decimal. The total is letters only, not all characters, so in Hello, World (12 characters, 10 letters) each of h, e, w, r and d is 10.0%.
Can I use letter frequency to solve a substitution cipher?
Yes, for a cipher that swaps each letter for another. Paste the ciphertext: in a long English message the most frequent symbols are good first guesses for E, T and A. Tick "Also list the letters a to z that do not occur" to see the unused letters with a count of 0. The shorter the text, the further its counts can be from the English averages.
Does it count accented letters and other alphabets?
Yes. Any Unicode letter counts: é, ñ and ø are letters of their own, and Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese characters are counted too. In Hindi the consonants count but the vowel signs do not, because Unicode classes them as marks. Upper and lower case are combined and shown in lower case.
How does my text compare with average English letter frequency?
Each letter a to z shows the English average beside its own share, with the difference in percentage points. In The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, o is 11.4% against an English average of 7.5% (+3.9), and a is 2.9% against 8.2% (-5.3). The English averages are Robert Lewand's, as reproduced on Wikipedia. Choose French, German, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese in Compare with to measure against that language instead: in El perro come la manzana, a is 20.0% against a Spanish average of 11.5% (+8.5). Accented letters and other alphabets get no comparison.
How much text can it count?
The first 200,000 characters; the page says when the rest was ignored. The list shows up to 200 different letters, most frequent first, and the percentages always use every letter counted.

Using the counts

Tick Also list the letters a to z that do not occur and missing letters appear with a count of 0, a pangram check: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog has 26 different letters and no zero rows.

Under each letter a to z the page prints the average for the language in Compare with and your text's difference in percentage points. In Hello, World the l row reads English 4.0% (+26.0): 30.0% of its letters are l, against 4.0% in typical English text. The English averages are Robert Lewand's (Cryptological Mathematics, 2000). The other five come from the table of other languages in Wikipedia's Letter frequency article (French: Tempé's corpus; German: Beutelspacher 2005; Spanish: Pratt 1942; Italian: Singh and Galli 1999; Portuguese: numaboa.com). The tool uses their a to z rows only, so é, ñ and ß get no comparison, and a text of a few dozen letters sits far from any average by chance.

How the share is worked out

share = letter count ÷ letters counted × 100, shown to one decimal. Only letters are counted, in any alphabet. Digits, spaces, punctuation and emoji are left out of both the count and the total. Letters are folded to lower case, and e typed with a separate combining accent counts the same as the single character é. İ counts as i; dotless ı, ß and the final sigma ς stay letters of their own.

Example: Hello, World has 10 letters, 7 of them different: l 3 (30.0%), o 2 (20.0%), and h, e, w, r and d 1 each (10.0%).

difference = share − language average, in percentage points: e in Hello, World is 10.0% against 12.7% in English, so it shows (-2.7), and against 16.4% in German (-6.4).

The first 200,000 characters are analysed. The list shows up to 200 letters, most frequent first; the percentages always use every letter counted.

Fun Fact: Of the six languages compared here, only Portuguese has a (14.6%) rather than e as its most common letter.

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