Character Frequency Counter

Analyze any text and see how often each character appears. Sort by frequency, alphabetically, or by category.

Input Text

Case-insensitive

Ignore spaces

Letters only

Frequency Table

Char	Count	Bar	%
Start typing to see frequency analysis…

Frequently Asked Questions

Frequency analysis is a classical cryptanalysis technique. In English, E is the most frequent letter (~13%), followed by T, A, O, I, N. If you know ciphertext is a substitution cipher, comparing its letter frequencies to expected English frequencies can help identify the mapping.

In a large corpus of English text, the letter frequency order (most to least common) is approximately: E, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R, D, L, C, U, M, W, F, G, Y, P, B, V, K, J, X, Q, Z. The most frequent letter E accounts for about 12–13% of all letters.

The percentage is the count of that character divided by the total number of characters in the analyzed set. If "Case-insensitive" is on, a and A are merged; if "Letters only" is on, only alphabetic characters are counted in the total.

How It Works

Paste Your Text

Paste any text into the input area. Choose whether to count case-insensitively, ignore spaces, or count letters only.

Count & Sort

Each character in the filtered text is counted. Results can be sorted by frequency (descending or ascending) or alphabetically.

Visual Bar Chart

A proportional bar and percentage show each character's relative frequency. The most frequent character's bar spans the full column width.

Common Use Cases

Cipher Cryptanalysis

Analyze ciphertext from substitution ciphers by comparing character frequencies to expected English letter distributions, helping decode unknown ciphers.

Language Identification

Different languages have distinct character frequency profiles. Frequency analysis can confirm whether unknown text is English, French, German, or another language.

Font Optimization

Identify the most-used characters in your content to prioritize which glyphs to include when subsetting a custom web font for performance.

Writing Style Analysis

Compare character frequency profiles of different authors or writing styles. High frequency of rare characters may indicate jargon-heavy or technical writing.

Keyboard Layout Design

Frequency analysis of a text corpus is a key input for designing optimized keyboard layouts (like Dvorak or Colemak) that place common keys on home row.

Data Quality Inspection

Detect unexpected characters in imported data — stray non-ASCII symbols, invisible control characters, or encoding artifacts — by inspecting the frequency table.