Letters vs characters — the real difference
A character is anything you can type — a letter, a digit, a space, a comma, an emoji. A letter is specifically an alphabetic symbol (A–Z in English; plus accented letters in other Latin-script languages). When you paste "Hello, world! 123", that string has 17 characters, but only 10 letters. Most social platforms enforce character limits, while most style rules quote letter or word figures — and mixing them up leads to wrong counts.
What this tool counts
- Letters: A–Z, plus optional non-English letters (á, é, í, ó, ú, ñ, ü, ç, ß, and other Latin diacritics).
- Characters: every character including spaces, digits, and punctuation.
- Vowels vs consonants: vowels are A, E, I, O, U (Y is not counted as a vowel by default — that is the mainstream English school-grammar convention).
- Unique letters: distinct letters that appeared at least once. Case-insensitive by default; toggle case-sensitive to count A and a separately.
- Non-letter characters: everything else — digits, punctuation, spaces, emojis.
The ETAOIN baseline
In standard English, letter frequency is roughly E (12.7%), T (9.1%), A (8.2%), O (7.5%), I (7.0%), N (6.7%), followed by S, H, R, D, L, U. This ordering is called ETAOIN SHRDLU and dates back to typesetting practice. The tool computes the difference between your text's per-letter frequency and the standard English baseline — useful for:
- Simple cipher analysis (Caesar / substitution ciphers stand out when their frequency does not match English).
- Stylometry — detecting texts that are unusually heavy in a specific letter.
- Language ID — French, Spanish, and German each have their own frequency signatures.
When you actually need this
- Puzzles — Wordle-style games, crosswords, anagrams.
- Writing exercises that constrain or forbid specific letters (lipograms).
- Basic cryptography teaching — frequency-based cipher breaking.
- Verifying that a passphrase has enough distinct letters.
- Linguistic homework and stylometry.
Frequently asked questions
Do spaces count as letters?
No. Spaces are non-letter characters. The Letters figure never includes spaces, digits, or punctuation.
Are numbers counted as letters?
No. Digits (0–9) are counted separately as non-letter characters.
Is Y a vowel?
In this tool, no. Y is counted as a consonant, in line with mainstream English school-grammar practice. Linguistically Y can act as a vowel (in myth, gym, rhythm), but that requires per-word analysis.
What counts as a non-English letter?
Any Latin-script letter that is not a plain A–Z or a–z — for example ñ, é, ü, ç, ß, å, ø, and Greek/Cyrillic letters if present.
How many unique letters can I have?
Up to 26 in case-insensitive mode (the size of the English alphabet). Case-sensitive mode allows up to 52 (A–Z plus a–z), and more if you include accented letters.
Is my text saved?
No. The counter runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Related text tools
Sources & methodology
- English letter-frequency baseline: Cornell Math Explorer / Norvig letter-frequency corpus averages (E 12.7%, T 9.1%, A 8.2%, O 7.5%, I 7.0%, N 6.7% ...).
- ETAOIN ordering: standard typesetting reference (Mayzner 1965, Norvig 2013 replication).
- Case handling and Unicode letter classification follow ECMAScript regex
/\p{L}/u.