This Arabic letter frequency counter ranks every letter in a passage of Arabic by how often it occurs, the classic first step in cryptanalysis and a useful lens for linguistics, typography, and keyboard layout. It automatically strips vowel marks and the tatweel so the counts reflect base letters only, and it offers an optional normalisation pass that folds the various hamza carriers and teh marbuta onto their base forms — exactly the convention used when analysing classical ciphers.
How it works
The tool first removes all tashkeel — the harakat ً ٌ ٍ َ ُ ِ ّ ْ, the superscript alef, the Quranic
annotation marks, and the tatweel/kashida ـ used only to stretch words. What remains is the run of
base letters in the ranges U+0621–U+064A and the extended Arabic letters. Each of those letters is
counted, and any character that is not an Arabic letter (spaces, Latin text, digits, punctuation) is
ignored.
When hamza normalisation is on, the tool maps the carrier variants to their base before tallying:
أ إ آ ٱ → ا, ؤ → و, ئ ى → ي, and ة → ه. This is important for frequency analysis, because
otherwise the many spellings of alef would each form their own row and understate how dominant alef
really is. Letters are finally sorted from most to least frequent, with each shown as a raw count and a
percentage of the total, computed as count / total × 100.
Example and tips
In almost any Arabic text the top of the list is led by alef (ا) and lam (ل), largely because the definite article ال is so pervasive, followed by mim, waw, ya, and nun. That stable signature is exactly what makes monoalphabetic substitution ciphers breakable: match the most common ciphertext symbols against this expected ordering and the plaintext starts to fall into place.
Turn normalisation on for cryptanalysis and corpus statistics, where you want all alef forms grouped; turn it off when you care about exact orthography, such as proofreading hamza placement. Because every step runs in your browser, sensitive documents never leave your device.