Letter Counter: How to Count Letters in Text

Quick Answer

A letter counter counts letters only: the alphabetic characters in your text, A through Z and their lowercase equivalents, plus letters from any language (accented Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, and so on). This is how to count letters only, excluding spaces and numbers, because digits, spaces, punctuation, and symbols are not letters and are not counted. That non-letter exclusion is the whole point. For example, "Hello, World!" contains 10 letters.

Letters vs Characters

Character count counts everything: letters, digits, spaces, punctuation, and symbols. "Hello, World!" is 13 characters (with the space).

Letter count counts only alphabetic characters. "Hello, World!" is 10 letters: H, e, l, l, o, W, o, r, l, d. The comma, space, and exclamation mark are excluded. This is the letters vs alphanumeric characters distinction, since alphanumeric would also include digits.

Use letter count when your constraint is specifically about alphabetic content rather than overall text length, such as how to check an alphabetic-only field. Use character count for platform limits like Twitter or SMS.

How the Letter Count Works

The count works by testing each character in your letters in text against Unicode's letter category and tallying only those that qualify. Everything else, digits, spaces, punctuation, and symbols, is skipped. Accented letters still count as letters, so diacritics like the accent on é do not remove a character from the total. The count updates live as you type.

What Counts as a Letter

This tool uses Unicode letter classification, which includes:

• English letters: A–Z and a–z
• Accented Latin characters: é, ñ, ü, ç, ø, and others
• Letters from other scripts: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and more

The following are not letters and are excluded from the count:

• Digits: 0–9
• Spaces, tabs, and line breaks
• Punctuation: comma, period, exclamation mark, apostrophe, hyphen
• Symbols: @, #, $, &, and others

Examples

Here are real examples to illustrate the difference between letters and other characters:

• "Hello, World!": 10 letters, 13 characters
• "abc 123": 3 letters, 7 characters
• "café": 4 letters, 4 characters (accented letters still count as letters)
• "It's a test.": 10 letters, 13 characters

When to Use a Letter Counter

• Checking password policies that require a minimum number of letters
• Measuring the alphabetic density of text (letters as a percentage of characters)
• Validating that a field contains a minimum number of alphabetic characters
• Analysing text composition in linguistics or language research
• Verifying that a code or identifier follows a letters-only or letters-and-digits rule

Common Mistakes

Related tools: explore all text analysis utilities in the Text Utilities collection, including Character Counter, Space Counter, and Word Counter.