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Free Online Character Frequency Counter With Letter Counts

Count every character in a piece of text and see which appear most, in your browser. Letters can be counted alone or with digits and punctuation, capitals folded together or kept apart, and invisible characters such as spaces and line breaks are named rather than left blank.

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Free Online Character Frequency Counter With Letter Counts

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Character Frequency Counter Everything happens in this tab. Nothing you paste is sent anywhere.

Your text

0 characters 0 words 0 lines

The counts

0 characters 0 lines

Count

Treat A and a as the same character Accented letters as their plain letter Include spaces and line breaks

Order and size Show

Copy as

0 counted 0 different - most used 0 used once

#	Character	Count	Share	How often
Nothing counted yet.

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How to Count Character Frequency In Text

A few steps, and nothing is uploaded.

Paste the text Anything from a sentence to a whole document. A .txt file can be dropped onto the box instead.

Choose what counts as a character Letters only is the usual choice for language work. Every character is what you want when you are hunting for an odd symbol.

Decide about capitals and accents Folding capitals together gives one row per letter. Flattening accents puts e with an acute in with plain e, which matters when the text mixes spellings.

Read the chart, copy the table The bars show the shape at a glance. The copy button takes the table as text or as comma separated values for a spreadsheet.

What to Know About Counting Characters

What a character is, and what the percentage is out of.

The percentage is out of what was counted, not out of the whole text. With letters only selected, the shares add up across the letters and ignore the spaces and punctuation entirely. That is the only way the figures make sense for language work, where the standard letter frequencies are quoted the same way.

Invisible characters are named rather than shown. A space, a tab and a line break all have counts, and all three would be blank cells if printed as themselves. They appear as named rows so the table can be read, and they are included or excluded with one switch.

A character is a Unicode code point, which is not always one symbol on screen. Most emoji are stored as two, and a letter with an accent may be stored as one character or as a letter followed by a separate accent mark. Flattening accents deals with the second case, which is why text that looks identical can give two different tables.

Folding capitals is the default because most questions are about letters, not about typography. If you are checking how often a document starts a sentence with a particular letter, or how heavily it uses capitals, switch the folding off and the two cases are counted separately.

Counting characters cannot tell you the file size. A character is one code point here, but a byte count depends on the encoding, where many characters take two or three bytes. The word and character counter reports the byte size if that is what you need.

Key Features & Capabilities

What this tool does, and what it deliberately does not.

Ranked with bars Every character in order of how often it appears, with a bar so the shape is visible at a glance.

Shares that add up Percentages are taken from what was actually counted, so they total one hundred and can be compared with published tables.

Five ways to narrow Every character, letters, letters and digits, digits alone, or punctuation and symbols on their own.

Invisible ones named Space, tab and line break get real rows with real names instead of blank cells you cannot interpret.

Copies out properly An aligned table for a document, or comma separated values that open straight into a spreadsheet.

Nothing is uploaded The counting happens in this tab, so manuscripts and private documents never leave your computer.

About the Character Frequency Counter

Counting characters by hand is impossible past a sentence or two, and yet the question comes up constantly. Which letter does this name use most. Is there a stray non standard character hiding in this imported file. Does this passage really follow normal English letter frequencies, or has somebody been avoiding a letter on purpose.

The part that trips up most tools is the invisible characters. A space is the most common character in almost any English text by a wide margin, and a table that silently drops it, or shows it as an empty cell, is worse than no table. Naming them costs nothing and makes the result readable.

The letters only option exists because that is how frequency is normally discussed. Published letter frequency tables for English ignore spaces and punctuation, so a tool that includes them gives numbers that cannot be compared with anything. Both views are here, and the percentages always refer to whatever was counted rather than to the text as a whole.

Frequently Asked Questions

Letters only, case folding, accents and invisible characters.

Because they are shares of what was counted, not of the whole text. With letters only selected, spaces and punctuation are outside the count entirely, so the letters share one hundred percent between them.

Yes, switch off "A and a as the same character". You then get one row for each, which is what you want when you are looking at how heavily a document uses capitals.

It counts a letter with an accent as its plain letter, so an e with an acute joins the plain e row. Useful when a document mixes spellings of the same word, and best left off when the accents themselves are what you are studying.

Set "Copy as" to comma separated values, then copy or download. The result opens straight into a spreadsheet with the character, count and share in their own columns.

Most are counted as two, because that is how they are stored. If you need emoji handled as single symbols, treat the counts for those rows as a pair rather than as two separate characters.