How letters are counted
The letter counter counts every alphabetic character in your text and nothing else. In Hello, world 2024! it finds 10 letters, while the character count is 18.
"Letter" here means any character that Unicode classifies as a letter. That covers the 26 letters of the English alphabet and also é, ñ, ß, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese characters, Japanese kana and so on. Digits, spaces, punctuation, symbols and emoji are not letters.
- Accents: é is one letter, even when it was typed or pasted as e followed by a separate accent mark. The text is normalized before counting, so both forms give the same result.
- Ligatures and special letters: œ, æ and ß are single letters in Unicode, so each counts as one.
- Apostrophes and hyphens are punctuation: don't has 4 letters, well-known has 9.
Letter frequency
Switch the "Most frequent" panel to Letters to see how often each letter appears, with its share of all letters. Uppercase and lowercase are grouped. This is handy for word games, cryptography exercises, checking a pangram, or comparing texts: in typical English prose, e, t and a are the most frequent letters.
Letters, characters and words
The other figures stay visible. Characters include spaces and punctuation; characters without spaces still include digits and punctuation. If a form says "letters" but you suspect it means characters, the character counter with and without spaces explains the difference, and the word counter covers word limits.
Frequently asked questions
Does a letter counter count spaces?
No. Spaces, line breaks, digits, punctuation and emoji are all excluded. Only letters are counted.
Are accented letters counted as one letter?
Yes. é, ü, ñ or ç count as one letter each, even if the accent was typed as a separate mark.
How do I count how many times a letter appears?
Open the Letters tab in the "Most frequent" panel. Each letter is listed with its number of occurrences and percentage, uppercase and lowercase combined.
Is a letter count the same as a character count?
No. A character count includes everything you type: letters, digits, spaces and punctuation. The letter count is always equal or lower.