Letter Counter: Count Each Letter in Your Text

What the letter counter does

It reads your text one character at a time, lowercases it, skips whitespace, and keeps a running tally for every distinct character it sees. The result is a list sorted from most frequent to least, like e: 14, t: 11, a: 9. Letters, digits, and punctuation each get their own line, so you can see at a glance whether a comma or a digit is inflating a count.

Case is folded on purpose. For almost every use of letter frequency, from puzzles to ciphers, Capital A and lowercase a are the same letter. Accented letters such as é are kept distinct from e, because in French or Spanish text they genuinely are different characters.

Worked examples

Mississippi: i: 4, s: 4, p: 2, m: 1. Total 11 letters, and only 4 distinct ones. That ratio of total letters to distinct letters is the classic spelling-bee trick for remembering it.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog: 35 letters, all 26 letters of the alphabet present, with o appearing 4 times, e 3 times, and t, h, u, and r twice each. It is the most famous English pangram, which is why typists and font designers have used it since the late 1800s.

Hello, World! 2026: l: 3, o: 2, 2: 2, then single counts for h, e, w, r, d, 0, 6, the comma, and the exclamation mark. Only 10 of those 16 non-space characters are letters. If you need letters only, add up the alphabetic lines.

English letter frequency, for reference

In large samples of English, the letters appear in a remarkably stable order. A widely cited ranking, from Robert Lewand's analysis, puts E first at about 12.7%, then 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%). At the bottom are J, X, Q, and Z, each at 0.2% or less. The mnemonic ETAOIN SHRDLU comes from the order of keys on old Linotype typesetting machines, which were arranged by frequency.

Short texts drift from these numbers, sometimes a lot. A 50-word paragraph about jazz will have far more z's than average. Frequency analysis becomes reliable only with a few hundred letters or more.

Practical uses

Word games. In Wordle, starting words rich in high-frequency letters like E, A, R, S, T, and O eliminate the most possibilities. In Scrabble, the tile distribution roughly tracks letter frequency: there are 12 E tiles but only one each of J, K, Q, X, and Z, and J, Q, X, and Z are worth 8 or 10 points each.

Ciphers and puzzles. A simple substitution cipher hides letters but not their frequencies. Count the ciphertext, match the most common symbol to E and the next to T, and cryptograms start falling apart. It is the method Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes uses in The Adventure of the Dancing Men, and Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug.

Writing checks. Teachers use letter counts for phonics and spelling activities, designers use them to see which glyphs a logo or headline needs, and people naming a product or baby sometimes want to balance repeated letters.

Getting a letters-only total

The tool lists every non-space character, so the total number of letters is the sum of the alphabetic lines. For a quick check, compare with the character counter: if a 200-character tweet has 38 spaces and 12 punctuation marks, it holds 150 letters and digits. For names and single words, the list is usually short enough to add at a glance.

Common mistakes

Confusing letter count with character count. Social media and SMS limits count every character, including spaces and punctuation; use the character counter for those. Forgetting that curly quotes and apostrophes are characters too: text pasted from Word or Google Docs often contains ’ instead of ', and both will show up as separate lines. And expecting perfect English frequencies from a short sample, which will not happen.