Letter Frequency Counter
Use this free Letter Frequency Counter to see how often each letter appears in your text. View occurrences, percentage frequency, unique letters, and sort the results instantly as you type.
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Letter Frequency Results
| Letter | Occurrences | Percentage |
|---|
How to Use the Letter Frequency Counter
Type or paste text into the box above. The Letter Frequency Counter analyzes the text automatically and displays how many times each letter occurs.
The frequency table also shows the percentage of all letters represented by each individual letter. You can sort the results from highest to lowest frequency, lowest to highest frequency, alphabetically from A-Z, or from Z-A.
Letters outside the basic English alphabet are included by default. This means letters such as ñ, é, ü, ø, and letters from other writing systems can be included in the frequency analysis.
If you only want to analyze the 26 English letters, select English letters only (A–Z). You can also count uppercase and lowercase letters separately or download the results as a CSV file.
What Is a Letter Frequency Counter?
A letter frequency counter measures how often individual letters occur within a piece of text. Instead of only telling you the total number of letters, it breaks that total down letter by letter.
For example, if a piece of text contains 100 letters and the letter E appears 12 times, the frequency of E is 12 occurrences, or 12% of the letters in the text.
How Is Letter Frequency Calculated?
Letter frequency can be expressed as a raw number of occurrences or as a percentage of all letters in the text.
If the letter A appears 15 times in text containing 100 letters, A has a letter frequency of 15%.
Letter Frequency Example
Consider the word banana. It contains six letters. A appears three times, N appears twice, and B appears once.
| Letter | Occurrences | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| A | 3 | 50% |
| B | 1 | 16.7% |
| N | 2 | 33.3% |
| Total | 6 | 100% |
What Does the Letter Frequency Percentage Mean?
The percentage column shows the share of all analyzed letters represented by a particular letter. This makes it easier to compare texts of different lengths.
For example, a letter appearing 20 times may seem frequent, but its significance depends on whether the text contains 100 letters or 10,000 letters. Percentage frequency provides that context.
English Letters Only (A-Z)
By default, the Letter Frequency Counter can include letters outside the basic English alphabet. For example, the ñ in Jalapeño can be counted as its own letter rather than being ignored or automatically changed to N.
Select English letters only (A–Z) when you want the analysis limited to A through Z. When this option is selected, letters outside A-Z are excluded rather than converted to another letter.
Case-Sensitive vs. Case-Insensitive Letter Frequency
By default, uppercase and lowercase forms of the same letter are combined. For example, A and a are treated as the same letter.
When Count uppercase and lowercase separately is enabled, uppercase and lowercase letters are counted separately. This can be useful when analyzing capitalization patterns, programming-related text, headings, or other text where letter case matters.
What Does Unique Letters Mean?
Unique Letters shows how many different letters appear in the analyzed text. Repeated occurrences of the same letter only count once toward this number.
For example, Jalapeño contains eight letters but seven unique letters because the letter A appears twice.
What Are the Most Common Letters in English?
In typical English text, the letter E is usually one of the most frequently used letters. Other commonly occurring letters include T, A, O, I, and N.
The exact order and percentages vary depending on the type of writing, subject, author, vocabulary, and sample size. A Letter Frequency Counter lets you measure the frequency of letters in your own text rather than relying on general averages.
What Is Letter Frequency Analysis Used For?
Letter frequency analysis can be useful whenever patterns in written text matter. Common uses include linguistics, cryptography, writing analysis, puzzles, and comparing different samples of text.
- Linguistics: compare letter-use patterns across texts, writers, or languages.
- Cryptography: frequency analysis can help identify patterns in substitution ciphers.
- Writing analysis: examine unusual repetition or compare letter distribution between documents.
- Word games and puzzles: identify frequently occurring letters when analyzing words or letter sets.
- Data analysis: export letter counts and percentages to CSV for further processing.
Letter Frequency vs. Letter Count
A letter count tells you how many letters are in a piece of text. Letter frequency goes one step further by showing which letters occur and how often each one appears.
If you need total letters along with characters, words, spaces, vowels, consonants, unique letters, average letters per word, and other text statistics, use our Letter Counter .
How Do I Count the Frequency of a Specific Letter?
Enter your text into the Letter Frequency Counter and find the letter in the results table. The Occurrences column shows the exact number of times that letter appears, while the Percentage column shows its share of all analyzed letters in the text.
You can also sort by Highest Frequency to move the most frequently used letters to the top of the table.
Are Spaces, Numbers, and Punctuation Included?
No. Letter frequency is calculated from letters rather than spaces, numbers, punctuation marks, emojis, or other non-letter characters.
This means a sentence can contain many total characters while still having a smaller number of letters used to calculate its letter-frequency percentages.
Related Letter and Text Tools
You may also find these CharacterCounter.com tools useful:
Letter Frequency Counter FAQ
What is letter frequency?
Letter frequency is the number of times a particular letter occurs in text. It can be expressed as an occurrence count or as a percentage of all analyzed letters.
Does the Letter Frequency Counter update automatically?
Yes. The results update automatically as you type or paste text into the textarea.
Does the tool count accented letters?
Yes. By default, letters such as ñ, é, ü, and other letters outside A-Z can be included in the analysis. Select English letters only (A–Z) if you want to exclude them.
Does ñ count as N?
No. When all letters are included, ñ is treated as a distinct letter rather than automatically converted to N.
Can I analyze only English letters?
Yes. Select English letters only (A–Z) to restrict the frequency analysis to the basic 26-letter English alphabet.
What are unique letters?
Unique Letters is the number of different letters found in your analyzed text. Multiple occurrences of the same letter count as one unique letter.
Can I sort letters by frequency?
Yes. You can sort the results by highest frequency, lowest frequency, A-Z, or Z-A.
Can uppercase and lowercase letters be counted separately?
Yes. Enable Count uppercase and lowercase separately to treat uppercase and lowercase forms as separate letters.
Can I download the letter frequency results?
Yes. Select Download as CSV to save the frequency table as a CSV file that can be opened in spreadsheet software.
Does the tool count spaces as letters?
No. Spaces are not letters and are not included when calculating letter frequency percentages.
What is the difference between this tool and the Letter Counter?
The Letter Counter focuses on total letters, characters, words, spaces, vowels, consonants, unique letters, average letters per word, and other text statistics. The Letter Frequency Counter focuses on how often each individual letter occurs and the percentage represented by each letter.