Letter Frequency Counter — Letters, Characters, Words & Bigrams
Count how often each letter, character, word or letter-pair appears — and compare with typical English.
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| Letter | Count | Share | Typical English |
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Typical English figures are the letter frequencies of general prose. Large gaps are what puzzle solvers look for: in a substitution cipher, the most common symbol is almost always E, T or A.
Count every letter, character, word or letter pair in a text and see the distribution as a sorted table with percentages. Letter mode shows the typical English frequency alongside your own, which is the comparison that cracks substitution ciphers, checks whether a passage is a pangram, and picks the best Wordle openers.
Unicode-aware (accented letters and emoji count correctly), case-sensitive on request, and exportable as CSV.
How to use Letter Frequency Counter
- Paste the text — a sentence, a chapter, a ciphertext.
- Choose what to count: letters A–Z, every character, words, or two-letter bigrams.
- Compare with English in letter mode; unused letters are listed too.
- Copy or download the table as CSV for a spreadsheet.
Why English letter frequency matters
In ordinary English prose, E is about 12.7% of letters, T 9.1%, A 8.2%, O 7.5%, I 7.0% and N 6.7%; at the other end, Z is 0.07%, Q 0.10%, X and J 0.15%. The pattern is so stable that any long enough English text reproduces it — which is why it is the first thing a cryptanalyst checks. In a simple substitution cipher every E becomes the same symbol, so the most frequent symbol in the ciphertext is almost certainly E, the next T or A, and the puzzle unravels from there. Frequency analysis is a thousand years old (al-Kindi, 9th century) and still breaks every newspaper cryptogram.
Bigrams
Letter pairs carry even more signal: TH, HE, IN, ER, AN, RE, ON, AT, EN, ND lead English; QU almost always appears together; a doubled letter is most likely LL, SS, EE, OO or TT. Bigram mode lists your text's pairs, which is how you confirm a cipher guess or spot the "TH" in a ciphertext.
Other uses
- Wordle and word games — the best opening words pack the commonest letters: adieu's vowels, or the R-S-T-L-N-E family.
- Typing and keyboard layouts — Dvorak and Colemak put E, T, A, O, I, N on the home row for exactly this reason.
- Pangram checks — the tool reports any unused letters, so "the quick brown fox…" shows none.
- Authorship and language guesses — German prose runs heavy in E and N; Spanish in A and E; Italian in vowels generally.
To count words, sentences and reading time rather than letters, use the word counter.
Frequently asked questions
What are the most common letters in English?
E (12.7%), T (9.1%), A (8.2%), O (7.5%), I (7.0%), N (6.7%), S (6.3%), H (6.1%), R (6.0%). The rarest are Z (0.07%), Q (0.10%), X and J (0.15% each). The table shows these next to your own text's figures.
How do I use this to solve a cryptogram?
Paste the ciphertext in letter mode. The most frequent symbol is very likely E; the next few are T, A, O, I, N in some order. Switch to bigram mode: the top pair is probably TH or HE, a doubled pair is LL, SS or EE. Substitute those, read what emerges, iterate.
Does it handle accented letters and other scripts?
Yes — counting is by Unicode letter, so é, ñ, ß, Greek and Cyrillic letters each count as their own character. The English comparison column only has values for A–Z; other letters show a dash there.
What does "case-sensitive" change?
Off (default), "E" and "e" are counted together, which is what frequency analysis wants. On, they are separate rows — useful when you are looking at capitalisation itself, or when the text is code.
Why is space the most common character?
In "every character" mode, yes — space is roughly one in six characters of English text, ahead of E. That is why letter mode exists: it counts letters only, which is what almost every frequency question is about.