Count Character Frequencies from a Text

Using the Counter that is part of the application WordCreator, you are able to determine the frequency of each letter or character of an arbitrary text. In this tutorial, I would like to show you how to do that.

In the following screenshot, you can see the tool WordCreator on Windows (the windows of the macOS version as well as of the Linux version are structured identical). At the top, there are two tabs - the Creator for creating new words as well as the Counter for counting texts. Here, we are of course interested in the Counter.

Now, we only have to follow the following steps:

1. First of all, we have to copy the text that we would like to count out into the box "Input" on the left side of the window. Alternatively, we can also right click on the input field in order to select "Load" from the context menu for loading the content of a file for counting (CTRL + O) or we can simply drag one or more text files onto the program.
2. After that, we just have to click on the button "Count" in order to see the result in the field on the right side like it is shown in the screenshot.
3. If we want to save the result, we can right-click on the field with the result and select one of the options for storing. The formats CSV, XLSX, ODS, HTML, DIF or TXT are available. Of course, the result can also be copied into the clipboard.

A prerequisite for the counting of letters is that in the settings under "What should be counted" the option "Letters" is selected (and not syllables, words or something else). Since the counting of letters is the default setting, we did not go into this point above.

Possibilities of Adjustments

You can reach the settings of the counter via the menu or via the button "Settings", which you can find on the underside of the window. Here you can also make further configurations for your count and thereby adapt the counter to your needs. For example, it is possible to count only specific letters, you can combine the counting of several letters or let them be counted individually (for example, uppercase and lowercase letters, umlauts, the ß or letters with accents), you can define exclusion criteria or you can adapt the output format according to your ideas.

Letter Frequencies of some Languages

We have already counted the average letter frequency of a total of 41 languages of different alphabets for you. On the one hand, you can find the results respectively the tables with the letter frequencies here and on the other hand directly within the WordCreator via the menu "Syllable Lists > Syllable Lists from Languages".