Which letters are counted
A, E, I, O and U, in either case, plus their accented forms: à á â ã ä å è é ê ë ì í î ï ò ó ô õ ö ù ú û ü and the rest. A letter with a combining accent typed separately is normalised first, so it counts once rather than twice. Y is handled by whichever of the three rules you select in the panel above.
The colouring in the editor is the point of this page. Every letter counted as a vowel is tinted amber on screen, so you are not asked to trust a number in isolation — you can look at the text and see the decision the tool made about every single letter, including each Y.
The Y problem, briefly
English has five vowel letters and about twenty vowel sounds, and Y is the seam where that mismatch shows. In yellow it is doing a consonant's job, gliding into the vowel that follows. In rhythm it is the only thing holding the syllable up. In everyday it does both, in different positions, in the same word.
The default rule — consonant when a vowel follows, vowel otherwise — gets the overwhelming majority of English words right. It is wrong on a small set of loanwords and on y after a vowel in words like day and boy, where the two letters together spell a single vowel sound and reasonable people classify it either way. That is the honest state of the question, and it is why the setting exists rather than a single answer being baked in. Is Y a vowel? works through the cases properly.
What people count vowels for
- Teaching phonics. Seeing the vowels lit up in a real sentence makes the pattern visible in a way a rule stated in the abstract does not.
- Word games and puzzles. Scrabble racks, Wordle strategy, crossword construction and constrained writing all turn on vowel distribution. A rack with one vowel is a rack you should trade.
- Cryptography exercises. Vowel frequency is the first thing you attack a substitution cipher with, and comparing your ciphertext's distribution against the English baseline is a standard classroom exercise.
- Constrained writing. Lipograms — a text avoiding a particular letter — are much easier to check with a live counter than by eye. Set the counter running and watch the E column in the frequency comb.
- Conlanging and naming. If you are inventing words, the vowel-to-consonant ratio is most of what makes a name feel like it belongs to a particular language.
Letters, not sounds
This is the one thing worth being clear about before you use a vowel count for anything serious. Queue has five letters, four of them vowel letters, and exactly one vowel sound. Rhythm has no vowel letters at all under the strict definition and two vowel sounds. Counting letters is well defined and reproducible; counting sounds requires a pronunciation dictionary and a decision about which accent you are transcribing.
If sounds are what you want, use the syllable estimate instead. It is an approximation — every syllable counter is — and how to count syllables explains where the approximation breaks down.
Common questions
Is Y a vowel?
It depends on the word, which is why the tool lets you choose. On the default setting Y is a consonant when a vowel follows it — yes, beyond, canyon — and a vowel everywhere else: rhythm, happy, my. You can also force it to be always one or always the other.
Do accented letters count as vowels?
Yes. à é î õ ü and the rest of the accented Latin vowels are counted as vowels, so café has two and naïve has three.
Does this count vowel sounds or vowel letters?
Letters. Queue has four vowel letters and one vowel sound. If you want a sound-based figure, the syllable estimate in the panel above is much closer to what you are after.
How many vowels are in the average English word?
About 38 to 40 per cent of the letters in ordinary English prose are vowels, which works out at roughly two vowels in an average five-letter word. E alone accounts for around a third of all vowels.
Why is vowels plus consonants smaller than my character count?
Because digits, spaces and punctuation are neither. Only letters are classified, so a sentence with numbers and heavy punctuation will show a large gap between the two totals.
Can I use this for languages other than English?
The counts will run on any Latin-alphabet text and the accented vowels are handled correctly, so French, Spanish, German and Portuguese all work. The Y rule is built for English, and the concept does not transfer to Arabic, Hebrew or the CJK scripts at all.