What a consonant is here
Every letter that is not a vowel. That is the whole definition, and it is deliberately mechanical: A, E, I, O, U and their accented forms are vowels, Y goes wherever your chosen rule sends it, and the remaining twenty letters are consonants. Digits, spaces, punctuation and emoji are not letters, so they are neither.
This is why the two totals never add up to the character count. In an ordinary paragraph of English, roughly 78 per cent of the characters are letters and the rest are spaces and punctuation, so a 1,000-character passage typically holds about 780 letters — something like 470 consonants and 310 vowels.
The ratio, and what moves it
English runs at about three consonants to every two vowels, and that ratio is stable enough across ordinary prose that a large deviation usually means something specific:
- A high consonant share points to technical or Germanic vocabulary, abbreviations, or a lot of proper nouns. Legal and medical writing sit noticeably above the baseline.
- A high vowel share points to loanwords from Romance languages, a conversational register, or text that is not English at all. Italian and Hawaiian are famous for it; Hawaiian has only eight consonants.
- An extreme figure either way in a short sample is usually noise. Ratios of this kind need a few hundred letters before they mean anything.
Consonants in phonics and spelling
Written English separates consonants from consonant sounds even more sharply than it does for vowels. Some cases worth knowing if you are teaching from this:
- Digraphs. sh, ch, th, ng and ph are two consonant letters spelling one sound. This counter reports two, because it counts letters.
- Silent letters. The k in knee, the b in lamb, the gh in though. Counted, but not pronounced.
- Doubled consonants. Letter has two ts and one t sound. The doubling is a spelling signal about the vowel before it, not a separate sound.
- Clusters. English tolerates three consonants at the start of a syllable (str-, spl-) and up to four at the end (-mpts in attempts), which is unusual among the world's languages and is a large part of why English is hard to learn to read.
The frequency comb is usually the better view
If you are counting consonants, you probably care which ones. The A–Z comb below the counter shows the distribution across your text, and comparing it against the English baseline is where the interesting information is. T, N, S, R and H are the five most common consonants in English by a wide margin; J, Q, X and Z together account for well under one per cent of all letters.
The reference figures to compare against are on the letter frequency page, with the caveat that the baseline depends heavily on what corpus produced it.
Common questions
Which letters count as consonants?
Every letter that is not A, E, I, O or U, or one of their accented forms. Y is assigned by whichever rule you pick in the panel, so it can land on either side. Digits, spaces and punctuation are not letters and count as neither.
What is the normal consonant-to-vowel ratio in English?
Around 60 per cent consonants to 40 per cent vowels in ordinary prose, or roughly three consonants to two vowels. Technical vocabulary and long Germanic compounds push the consonant share up; Italian, Spanish and Hawaiian text sit far lower.
Are consonant clusters counted separately?
No. Each letter is counted individually, so the cluster in strengths counts as its component consonants rather than as one unit.
Why do vowels and consonants not add up to my letter count?
They should, exactly. If they do not, the difference is Y being reassigned by the rule you chose. Vowels plus consonants is always smaller than the character count, though, because spaces, digits and punctuation are excluded.
Can I count consonants in a name to check a pattern?
Yes, and the letter frequency comb below the counter is usually the more useful view for that, because it shows which consonants rather than just how many.
Does this work on text with numbers in it?
Yes. Digits are simply not classified as either vowels or consonants, so a table of figures will show a large character count and a small letter count.