Character Frequency Counter

Analyze Character Frequency

Paste or type any text below and click Analyze to see a full breakdown of every character and how often it appears.

What is a Character Frequency Counter?

A Character Frequency Counter analyzes a block of text and counts how many times each individual character — letters, digits, spaces, and punctuation — appears. It is a fundamental tool in text analysis, cryptography, data science, and natural language processing. Understanding character distribution can reveal patterns in writing style, help detect encoding issues, or assist in solving substitution ciphers.

How to Use This Tool

1. Paste or type your text into the input box above.
2. Choose your options: ignore case, skip spaces, ignore punctuation, or count letters only.
3. Click Analyze to see a full character breakdown.
4. Use the Table view for sortable results or switch to Chart for a visual bar graph.
5. Sort results by frequency (high to low or low to high) or alphabetically.
6. Click Copy Results to export the data as plain text.

Key Features

• Sortable table: Sort by frequency descending, frequency ascending, or alphabetically.
• Visual bar chart: See character distribution at a glance with an inline bar chart (top 40 characters).
• Flexible filters: Optionally ignore case, spaces, punctuation, or non-letter characters.
• Summary stats: See total characters, unique characters, most frequent character, and total letters at a glance.
• Copy results: Export the frequency table as plain text for use in spreadsheets or reports.
• 100% browser-based: No data is uploaded to any server.

Common Use Cases

• Cryptography: Frequency analysis is a key technique for breaking classical ciphers like Caesar or substitution ciphers. The most frequent characters in English text are E, T, A, O, and I.
• Natural Language Processing: Character frequency distributions are used to identify language, detect anomalies in text, and build n-gram models.
• Data Cleaning: Spot unexpected characters, invisible Unicode characters, or encoding artifacts in datasets.
• Writing Analysis: Analyze how often certain letters appear in your writing style or in a specific piece of literature.
• Password Auditing: Check how varied the character distribution is in a generated password or passphrase.

English Character Frequency Reference

In standard English text, the most commonly occurring letters are (in order): E, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R, D. The letter E alone accounts for roughly 12–13% of all characters in typical English prose. This frequency pattern is consistent enough that it forms the basis of frequency analysis attacks on classical encryption systems. Use our tool to compare your own text against this known distribution.