Letter Frequency Counter
| Rank | English letters by frequency | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 1-6 | E T A O I N | ~40% of all letters |
| 7-12 | S H R D L U | ~26% more |
| 13-26 | C M W F G Y P B V K J X Q Z | the rare tail - Q last |
Paste any text and this counter tallies every letter - case-insensitive, punctuation-blind - sorted from most to least frequent, with counts and percentages side by side. Compare your text's order against ETAOIN SHRDLU, the classic most-common-English-letters ranking, and see immediately whether your sample is typical English or something stranger: a cipher, a list of names, or a chapter that mentions Zebras a lot.
The working uses: cracking simple substitution ciphers (the most common cipher letter is usually E), crossword and word-game strategy (which letters does this puzzle's answer bank actually contain), linguistics coursework, keyboard layout debates, and checking a generated word list for accidental bias. Everything runs in this browser tab; nothing uploads, and the text stays on your device.
How to use
- Paste your text - the frequency table builds live, sorted by count from most to least common.
- Compare the top letters against ETAOIN SHRDLU, the frequency order of ordinary English.
- Read percentages to compare samples of different lengths - counts lie between documents, percentages don't.
Frequently asked questions
What is letter frequency used for?
Cracking simple substitution ciphers is the classic: in ordinary English, E, T, A and O dominate, so the most common cipher letter is a good bet for E. Puzzle solvers use it for Wheel of Fortune strategy and Wordle openers, linguists for language comparison, keyboard designers for layout decisions, and writers for checking whether a chapter leans unnaturally hard on one letter.
What is ETAOIN SHRDLU?
The twelve most common letters in English in order: E, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R, D, L, U. The string itself is typesetting folklore - linotype operators ran their fingers down the layout to clear the machine, and the nonsense phrase slipped into print for decades as a ghost. Paste ordinary English here and your top letters should land somewhere near that order; big departures mean your sample isn't ordinary.
Is the count case-sensitive?
No - capital and lowercase letters pool together, because frequency analysis cares about the letter, not its presentation. Punctuation, digits and spaces are ignored entirely. If you need case-sensitive or symbol counting, the word counter's character mode handles the full character census; this tool stays focused on the twenty-six letters.
Why do percentages matter more than counts?
Counts only compare within one text: 40 E's means nothing until you know the text is 200 letters long or 20,000. Percentages normalize the sample, so a paragraph and a novel can be compared honestly - and the percentage is also what cipher-solving tables quote, since letter frequency in general English is stable across samples large enough to average out their quirks.
Does letter frequency differ between languages?
Dramatically - and it is how cryptographers identify the language of an intercepted message. English leans on E; German floods with E and N but barely uses J; Spanish leans A and O; Finnish doubles its vowels past every neighbor. Even within English, fiction, legal text and recipe blogs drift apart - which is exactly why the comparison against ETAOIN SHRDLU is interesting rather than decorative.