Vowel and consonant counter.

Definitions used

A vowel here is one of the letters a, e, i, o or u, counted by spelling and not by sound. A consonant is any other letter A to Z. The letter y is handled as you choose: as a consonant (the default), as a vowel, or not counted at all. Accented letters are folded to their base letter, and digits, spaces and punctuation are ignored. Percentages and the vowel-to-consonant ratio use the counted letters only.

Word length is the number of letters and digits in a word; apostrophes and hyphens inside a word are not counted, and a hyphenated word such as "well-known" is one word. The tool reports the mean, the median, the most common length (the mode, with the smaller length winning a tie), the longest and shortest word, and a count for each length.

Worked example

"Hello, world! Why so quiet?" has 7 vowels and 13 consonants with y counted as a consonant, 8 vowels and 12 consonants with y counted as a vowel, and 7 vowels and 12 consonants when y is not counted. It has 5 words with an average length of 4.0 letters.

Limits

Counting by spelling means a word like "hour" (silent h) or "queue" is judged by its letters, not its sounds, and the tool only covers the English alphabet. For sounds, the syllable counter uses a pronunciation dictionary. No external source is needed for these definitions; they are stated here so the numbers are reproducible.

Letters versus sounds

The word "vowel" names two different things. In phonetics, a vowel is a sound produced with an open vocal tract; in writing, a vowel is a letter that usually stands for such a sound. English spelling does not line up neatly with sound: the same letter can stand for several vowel sounds, and a sound can be written several ways. The letters a, e, i, o and u are the vowel letters everyone agrees on, and this counter uses them as its definition. It counts letters on the page, not the sounds you would hear.

The special case of y

The letter y is the awkward one because it does both jobs. As a consonant it normally represents the sound at the start of yes, in beyond, lawyer and canyon. As a vowel it stands for the sounds of i, as in system and myth, of the vowel in my and type, or the final sound of happy and baby. Because no spelling-based rule can know which one applies, the tool lets you choose the treatment: consonant (the default), vowel, or leave y out of both counts.

Worked example: the effect of the y setting

"Hello, world! Why so quiet?" has 20 letters. With y as a consonant: 7 vowels and 13 consonants, 35 percent vowels. With y as a vowel: 8 vowels and 12 consonants. With y left out: 7 vowels and 12 consonants, since one letter is ignored. For "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" there are 35 letters; with y as a consonant that is 11 vowels and 24 consonants, a vowel share of 31.4 percent and a vowel-to-consonant ratio of 0.46. Count y as a vowel and it becomes 12 and 23. The same sentence therefore reads as 31.4 or 34.3 percent vowels depending on a setting, which is why the setting is displayed with the result.

Worked example: words with no vowel letters

"Rhythm" has six letters and no a, e, i, o or u, so it scores 0 vowels and 6 consonants with y as a consonant, and 1 vowel and 5 consonants with y as a vowel. This is the classic test for the y setting. In the other direction, "queue" has 4 vowel letters and 1 consonant, even though it is pronounced like the single letter q.

Word length statistics

Word length counts letters and digits, so an apostrophe or hyphen is not counted and a hyphenated word counts as one word. The tool reports the mean, median and most common length (the mode, using the smaller length if two tie), plus the longest and shortest word and how many words there are of each length. For the pangram above the lengths are 3, 5, 5, 3, 5, 4, 3, 4 and 3: the mean is 3.9, the median is 4 and the mode is 3, because 3 appears four times and 5 only three. Mean and median differ whenever a few unusually long words pull the average up, so look at both before drawing a conclusion.

Where people use vowel counts

• Homework and word games: checking a count before submitting it, or building puzzles where the number of vowels matters.
• Teaching spelling and phonics: showing how few vowel letters a word can have, or how many (the word "queue" has four).
• Cipher and coding exercises: frequency analysis starts with counts of letters and vowels.
• Style comparisons: comparing average word length across two samples of writing.

The numbers describe spelling, so do not use them to measure readability or pronunciation. A text can have a low share of vowel letters because it contains many consonant clusters, as in strengths, which has 1 vowel and 8 consonants, without being hard to read. For the number of syllables, which is what actually reflects sound, use the syllable counter; for sentence and word statistics use the sentence length analyzer and the word count checker.

Edge cases

• Accents: accented letters are folded to their base letter, so é counts as e.
• Digits and symbols: digits are ignored by the vowel and consonant counts but do count toward word length.
• Other alphabets: only A to Z are counted; Greek, Cyrillic and other scripts are ignored.
• w: unlike y, w is always counted as a consonant here, even in words such as cow where it forms part of a vowel sound.
• Abbreviations and initials: every letter counts, so "NASA" has two vowels and two consonants.