How to Count Character Frequency in Text (Letters, Symbols and Spaces)

A character frequency table shows which letters a text uses most. It has practical uses from codebreaking to proofreading, and it is easy to produce when you have the right tool.

Quick answer

Paste your text and the tool lists each character with its count, ordered from most to least common. You can ignore capital letters or spaces if you wish.

What it is good for

• Simple ciphers. In English the commonest letters are E, T, A, O and N. A substitution cipher keeps those frequencies, so the most frequent symbol is probably E.
• Language study. Compare the frequency of letters in English, Bangla or another language.
• Text checks. Spot an unexpected symbol, a double space habit or a stray character in data.
• Puzzles and games. Find hidden patterns in a long string.

Steps

1. Paste or type your text.
2. Choose whether to ignore case and whether to count spaces.
3. Read the sorted list. Copy it if you need it elsewhere.

Reading the result

A short text can be misleading. With 100 characters, the numbers are noisy; with 1,000 or more, they settle near the language's typical pattern.

Tips

• For word frequency (instead of characters), use the keyword density counter.
• Remove punctuation first if you only want letters.
• For Bangla, remember that vowel signs and conjuncts are made of several Unicode characters, so counts are by code point.

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