Vowels, consonants and letter counts
This tool counts the vowels and consonants in any text as you type, along with the total number of letters, words and sentences. The bar chart shows how often each letter from A to Z appears, and the preview highlights every vowel so you can see where they fall.
What counts as a vowel?
In written English the vowel letters are A, E, I, O and U. Every other letter is a consonant. Y is the awkward one: it is a consonant at the start of "yes" but works as a vowel in "gym", "myth" and "happy". Turn on Count Y as a vowel if you want every Y counted with the vowels.
Accented letters are counted as their base letter, so é counts as E and ü as U. Digits, spaces, punctuation and letters outside the Latin alphabet are not counted as vowels or consonants.
How words and sentences are counted
- Words are runs of letters or digits. Contractions and hyphenated words such as "don't" and "well-known" count as one word.
- Sentences end with a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis. Abbreviations like "e.g." can make the count slightly high.
Letter frequency in English
In typical English text, E is the most common letter at around 12 to 13% of all letters, followed by T, A, O, I and N. Vowels make up roughly 38 to 40% of letters. Letter frequency is the basis of frequency analysis, the classic way to break simple substitution ciphers: the most common symbol in a long ciphertext is probably E.
Teachers use vowel counts in phonics lessons, linguists compare vowel ratios between languages, and writers sometimes use them for constrained writing such as lipograms, where a letter is avoided entirely.
