Here are a few different ways to think about it:
* Letters: The English alphabet has 26 letters (A-Z).
* Characters: If you include punctuation, digits, and special symbols, the number of characters in the English language can be much larger. Some estimates put it around 250+.
* Unicode: Unicode is a standard that assigns a unique number to every character in every language. There are currently over 143,000 characters in Unicode, and English uses a subset of these.
So, depending on how you define "characters", the answer could be anywhere from 26 to over 143,000!