Letter counter with every letter broken out

No — a space is not a letter, and neither is a digit, a comma or a dash. That is the whole difference between this page and a character count: “Hello, world 2026!” is 18 characters but 10 letters. The four tiles under the box show exactly what was excluded — digits, spaces, punctuation and symbols — so the numbers always add up and you can see where the difference went.

It always counts as a letter; whether it counts as an e is a switch you control. With folding on, which is the default, é, è and ê all add to the e row, ñ adds to n and å adds to a, which is what you want when you are analysing English text peppered with café, naïve and résumé. Switch folding off and they leave the 26 rows entirely and are reported as letters from outside the English alphabet, listed individually. German ß has no single base letter and always sits outside; Greek, Cyrillic and Chinese characters are counted as letters in the total but have no row of their own.

A consonant by default, with a switch to move it. English has no clean answer: y is a vowel in rhythm, myth and happy, a consonant in yellow and yet, and both in yolky. It appears in about 2 per cent of English letters, so the choice moves the vowel share by roughly two points — enough to matter if you are comparing two texts, which is why the setting is visible rather than buried.

A pangram is a sentence that uses all 26 letters at least once, and the grid above turns solid when yours does. The famous one — the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog — spends 35 letters doing it. A perfect pangram uses exactly 26, one of each, and English has very few that make sense without proper nouns or obscure words. Until the grid is full, the missing letters are named underneath it, which is faster than checking j, q, x and z by eye every time.

E, at about 12.7 per cent of all letters, followed by t, a, o, i and n. The last column of the table above carries the full set of figures from Robert Lewand's Cryptological Mathematics, the count cryptographers have used for decades. They hold up remarkably well on any ordinary English page of a few hundred words, which is what makes them useful: a text where your own percentages wander far from them is usually full of names, technical terms, another language, or is simply too short for the averages to mean anything.

Because some limits and puzzles are about letters specifically, not everything you typed. Crossword and Wordle answers, Scrabble racks, monogram and initials work, cryptogram solving, alliteration checks in a headline, and any assignment phrased as “write a 500-letter summary” all mean letters alone. Anything counted by a web form, a text message or an X post means characters, spaces and punctuation included — that is a different number, and the character counter is the page for it.

No, A and a share a row, because the question people are asking is how often the letter appears rather than how it was typed. That is also how letter-frequency tables, crossword grids and Scrabble tiles treat the alphabet. If the split between capitals and lower case is what you are after, a case converter shows it directly: convert a copy of the text to lower case and compare the two letter counts.