Letters and numbers are two different ways of writing down the same thing: information. Most of the time we keep them apart. We read words as words and we count numbers as numbers. But every so often you need to cross the bridge between them, either turning letters into numbers or numbers back into letters. Maybe you are decoding a puzzle where A = 1 and Z = 26. Maybe you are working out which column of a spreadsheet "AB" refers to. Maybe you are cleaning a messy list, fixing text that arrived in ALL CAPS, or turning a long headline into a tidy web address. All of these are moments when the boundary between letters and numbers suddenly matters.
This guide is a complete, practical walkthrough of that territory. It explains what it really means to convert letters to numbers, where the idea comes from, and how the reverse works. It covers letter case, sorting, text cleaning, and accurate counting, because in real life these tasks travel together. And it is built around the free Text & Number Studio tool on this page, a browser-based utility that handles every one of these jobs in six languages without sending your text anywhere. Everything happens on your own device.
You will find ready-to-use reference tables, the exact conversion formulas, a short and genuinely interesting history of the practice, a set of step-by-step recipes, and answers to the questions people actually search for. By the end you will not only know how a letter-to-number converter works, you will understand the ideas well enough to trust the results and use them with confidence.
What "converting letters to numbers" actually means
The phrase sounds simple, but it hides at least three different ideas, and mixing them up is the most common source of confusion. When someone says they want to convert letters to numbers, they usually mean one of the following.
The first and most popular meaning is alphabet position. Each letter is replaced by its place in the alphabet: A becomes 1, B becomes 2, and so on up to Z, which becomes 26. This scheme is so common in puzzles, games, and classrooms that it has a nickname: A1Z26. It is the default meaning behind most searches for a letter-to-number converter, and it is the primary conversion built into the tool on this page.
The second meaning is the character code, usually ASCII or its modern successor, Unicode. Here every character, not just letters, is assigned a number that computers use internally. In this system the capital letter A is 65, the lowercase a is 97, the digit 0 is 48, and a space is 32. Character codes are the language of software, but they are rarely what a person means when they scribble "A = 1" on paper.
The third meaning is letters that are themselves numerals, the classic example being Roman numerals, where I is 1, V is 5, X is 10, and so on. This is a completely separate system: the letters are not standing in for their alphabet position, they are dedicated number symbols. Confusing Roman numerals with A1Z26 leads to wrong answers, so it helps to keep them clearly apart.
The table below lines these systems up side by side so the differences are obvious at a glance.
| System | How letters map | Value of "A" | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| A1Z26 (alphabet position) | Position in the alphabet, A = 1 to Z = 26 | 1 | Puzzles, games, teaching, simple encoding |
| ASCII / Unicode | Internal character code for every symbol | 65 (a = 97) | Programming and data |
| Roman numerals | Select letters act as number symbols | Not used (I = 1, V = 5, X = 10) | Dates, page numbering, clocks |
| Abjad numerals (Arabic) | Traditional letter order with fixed values | 1 (the letter alif) | Historical numbering, chronograms |
| Hebrew gematria | Each letter has a numeric value | 1 (aleph) | Text analysis, tradition |
For the rest of this guide, whenever we say "convert letters to numbers" without qualification, we mean the A1Z26 scheme, because that is what the majority of people are looking for and what the converter here does by default. The other systems appear later, in their own sections, because they carry a fascinating history that is worth knowing.
The complete A to Z number chart (quick reference)
Here is the reference table you can bookmark and return to. It shows every letter of the English alphabet with its A1Z26 value. Because there are twenty-six letters, the chart is laid out in two columns so it stays compact and easy to scan. The left pair covers A through M, and the right pair continues with N through Z.
| Letter | Number | Letter | Number |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 1 | N | 14 |
| B | 2 | O | 15 |
| C | 3 | P | 16 |
| D | 4 | Q | 17 |
| E | 5 | R | 18 |
| F | 6 | S | 19 |
| G | 7 | T | 20 |
| H | 8 | U | 21 |
| I | 9 | V | 22 |
| J | 10 | W | 23 |
| K | 11 | X | 24 |
| L | 12 | Y | 25 |
| M | 13 | Z | 26 |
A few things are worth noticing about this chart. The letter case does not change the number: whether you write a capital A or a lowercase a, the value is still 1, because A1Z26 cares about the letter, not its shape. Vowels are scattered rather than grouped, which is why words rarely produce neat numeric patterns. And the midpoint is easy to remember: M is 13 and N is 14, splitting the alphabet almost exactly in half. That single fact makes a surprising number of quick mental conversions easier, because you can count forward from A or backward from Z, whichever letter is closer.
The conversion formulas, explained
Reference charts are handy, but the real power comes from understanding the formulas behind them. Once you know the rule, you never have to memorise anything. There are three operations to cover: turning letters into numbers, turning numbers back into letters, and adding up a word's letters to get a single value.
Letters to numbers
The rule is simply the letter's position in the alphabet. A is the first letter, so it is 1. T is the twentieth letter, so it is 20. That is all there is to it for a human. If you want the version a computer uses, it is a small piece of arithmetic based on character codes: take the code point of the lowercase letter and subtract 96, because the lowercase letter a has the character code 97. So number = charCode(lowercase letter) − 96. For the letter h, whose code is 104, that gives 104 minus 96, which is 8, and indeed h is the eighth letter. The tool uses exactly this method, which is why it is instant and never miscounts.
Numbers to letters
Going the other way, you reverse the arithmetic. Add 96 to the number and convert that character code back into a letter, or, in plain human terms, count that many letters into the alphabet. The number 20 becomes the twentieth letter, T. Numbers outside the range 1 to 26 have no letter, so a well-behaved converter simply leaves them untouched. That is why the tool passes larger numbers straight through instead of producing gibberish.
Word value: adding the letters up
The third operation totals the values of every letter in a word to produce one number, sometimes called the word's value or, in older traditions, its gematria. The formula is just a sum: word value = number of letter 1 + number of letter 2 + … and so on. The word CAT is C plus A plus T, which is 3 plus 1 plus 20, giving 24. This single number is the seed of numerology, of certain word games, and of a few clever verification tricks, and the tool calculates it per word so you can process a whole list at once.
The next table brings these three formulas together with worked examples so the pattern is unmistakable.
| Operation | Rule | Example input | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Letters to numbers | Each letter becomes its alphabet position (A = 1) | HELLO | 8-5-12-12-15 |
| Letters to numbers | Each letter becomes its alphabet position | TOOLIQO | 20-15-15-12-9-17-15 |
| Numbers to letters | Each number becomes the matching letter | 8-9 | HI |
| Numbers to letters | Each number becomes the matching letter | 3-1-20 | CAT |
| Word value (sum) | Add every letter's value together | CAT | 24 |
| Word value (sum) | Add every letter's value together | HELLO | 52 |
One detail in that table is easy to miss but important in practice. Look at how HELLO becomes 8-5-12-12-15 with hyphens between the numbers, while spaces separate whole words. This is not decoration. Because H is 8 and E is 5, writing them side by side as "85" would be ambiguous, since 85 could also mean two separate letters or a number out of range. Joining a single word's numbers with hyphens and keeping spaces between words removes that ambiguity completely, which means the result can be converted back into the original text without guessing. The tool follows this convention on both sides, so a round trip from letters to numbers and back returns exactly what you started with.
A short history of turning letters into numbers
The urge to give letters numeric values is ancient, and it shows up independently in several cultures. Long before A1Z26 became a staple of children's puzzle books, scholars were assigning numbers to letters for reasons that were part mathematics, part philosophy, and part play.
In Hebrew, the practice is called gematria. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet carries a value: aleph is 1, bet is 2, and the sequence continues up through the tens and hundreds. Because Hebrew used letters as its everyday numerals for centuries, calculating the numeric value of a word was as natural as spelling it, and readers looked for meaningful connections between words that shared a total. The Greeks did something very similar with a system now known as isopsephy, where the numeric values of the letters in a word or name were added together.
Arabic has its own elegant version, the abjad numerals. The letters are arranged in an old order, remembered through the mnemonic words abjad, hawwaz, hutti, and so on, and each is given a fixed value. The letter alif is 1, ba is 2, jim is 3, and the sequence climbs through the tens, hundreds, and up to a thousand. For a very long time this was how Arabic-speaking mathematicians, astronomers, and poets wrote numbers, and it is still used today to compose chronograms, phrases whose letter values add up to a meaningful date. The first several abjad values are shown below.
| Letter (Arabic) | Name | Value |
|---|---|---|
| ا | alif | 1 |
| ب | ba | 2 |
| ج | jim | 3 |
| د | dal | 4 |
| ه | ha | 5 |
| و | waw | 6 |
| ز | zay | 7 |
| ح | ha (heavy) | 8 |
| ط | ta | 9 |
| ي | ya | 10 |
The plain A1Z26 scheme that dominates today is the simplest descendant of all this history. It strips away the tens and hundreds and just counts positions, which makes it perfect for casual use. You will meet it in escape rooms, in geocaching clues, in the puzzle pages of newspapers, and in beginner cryptography lessons, where it is often the very first cipher a student learns before moving on to shift ciphers like the Caesar cipher. It is worth being clear about one thing, though: A1Z26 is not secure. Anyone who recognises the pattern can decode it in seconds. It is a tool for fun, teaching, and lightweight encoding, not for protecting anything that truly needs to stay secret.
Letter case: the overlooked half of text
If converting letters to numbers is one half of what people need from a text tool, changing letter case is the other. It is so routine that we barely think about it, yet getting case wrong can make writing look careless, break a database lookup, or leave a document impossible to read. The tool on this page treats case with the same care as its number conversions, offering every common style.
A quick piece of trivia explains the very names we use. The terms "uppercase" and "lowercase" come from the physical world of printing. When type was set by hand, the small metal letters were kept in wooden trays called cases. The capital letters lived in the upper case, sitting higher on the workbench, and the small letters lived in the lower case, within easier reach. The typesetter's shorthand outlived the technology, and now everyone talks about upper and lower case without ever having touched a tray of type.
Here are the main case styles, what each one does, and when it earns its place.
- UPPERCASE turns every letter capital. It is loud by design, useful for short labels, acronyms, and warnings, but tiring to read in long stretches because the even height of capitals removes the shape cues our eyes rely on.
- lowercase makes every letter small. It is calm and modern, common in branding and casual writing, and handy when you need to normalise text so that comparisons ignore case.
- Sentence case capitalises only the first letter of each sentence, exactly as you would write ordinary prose. It is the safest choice for headings and body text in most languages.
- Capitalize Each Word, often called title case, puts a capital at the start of every word. It suits titles, names, and headlines, though strict style guides keep small words like "and" or "of" lowercase, a refinement beyond simple automatic capitalisation.
- aLtErNaTiNg case flips between small and capital letters as it goes. It has no formal use, but it is popular online as a playful, mocking tone, and it is genuinely fun to generate.
- Swap case inverts whatever you already have, turning capitals small and small letters capital. It is a quick way to correct text that was typed with the caps lock accidentally left on.
Because seeing is faster than reading, the table below runs a single phrase through every style so you can compare the results directly.
| Case style | Input: "Hello World" |
|---|---|
| UPPERCASE | HELLO WORLD |
| lowercase | hello world |
| Sentence case | Hello world |
| Capitalize Each Word | Hello World |
| aLtErNaTiNg | hElLo WoRlD |
| Swap case | hELLO wORLD |
There is an accessibility point hiding in here that many writers never learn. Long passages set entirely in capitals are measurably harder to read for most people, and they cause particular difficulty for readers with dyslexia. Screen readers can also misinterpret all-caps words, sometimes spelling out a normal word letter by letter as if it were an acronym. So the humble "sentence case" button is not just tidy, it is a small act of considerate design. Reserve capitals for the moments that genuinely need emphasis.
Sorting, deduplicating, and shuffling text
Ordering a list of items is one of the oldest jobs in computing, and it hides more subtlety than most people expect. The tool can sort by lines, by spaces, or by commas, so you can point it at whatever structure your text happens to have, and it offers several kinds of order.
Alphabetical sorting arranges items A to Z or Z to A. This is straightforward for words, but it becomes interesting the moment numbers are involved. Consider a list that reads "item2, item10, item1." A naive alphabetical sort compares character by character and decides that "item10" comes before "item2," because the character 1 sorts before 2. To a human that looks broken, since ten should obviously come after two. The answer is natural sorting, which recognises runs of digits and compares them as whole numbers, so "item2" correctly lands before "item10." The alphabetical sort in this tool is natural-order aware, which spares you the classic frustration of files and versions lining up in the wrong sequence.
Numeric sorting is for lists that are genuinely numbers, ordering them by value from smallest to largest or the reverse. A robust numeric sort also has to decide what to do with entries that are not numbers at all; this tool keeps them together at the end rather than scrambling the list, so a stray label never corrupts the order. Sorting by length is a lesser-known option that arranges items from shortest to longest, which is oddly useful when you are hunting for outliers, checking password or code lengths, or laying out text that needs to fit a fixed space.
Two more operations round out the set. Removing duplicates keeps the first occurrence of each item and discards the rest, which turns a sprawling, repetitive list into a clean set of unique values in one click. Shuffling puts the items into random order, useful for drawing names, randomising quiz questions, or creating unbiased samples. It is worth mentioning that a fair shuffle is harder to write correctly than it looks; a lazy implementation quietly favours some orders over others. This tool uses the Fisher-Yates algorithm, the standard method that gives every possible arrangement an equal chance, so your "random" really is random.
Cleaning and fixing messy text
Text copied from the web, from PDFs, or from email arrives full of invisible mess: doubled spaces, stray line breaks, trailing whitespace, and punctuation you did not ask for. Cleaning it up by hand is tedious and error-prone. A good text tool does it instantly, and this one includes the full set of tidying operations.
You can trim spaces to collapse runs of spaces into single ones and strip whitespace from the ends of each line, which alone fixes the majority of copy-paste problems. Collapsing blank lines reduces stacks of empty rows down to a single break, perfect for reflowing text that was double or triple spaced. Removing line breaks flattens a block into one continuous line, handy when a paragraph was broken up awkwardly. You can strip out spaces entirely, delete every digit, delete every letter, or remove all punctuation, each of which is a common step in preparing data or isolating exactly the characters you want. There is even a reverse text option that flips the entire string end to end, which is mostly for fun but occasionally useful for creating mirror text or checking palindromes.
The standout cleaning feature for anyone who publishes online is slugify. A slug is the human-readable part of a web address, the piece after the last slash that describes the page, like the words in this article's own link. Good slugs are lowercase, use hyphens instead of spaces, drop punctuation and accents, and stay short and descriptive. Search engines read them, people read them when deciding whether to click, and they show up in shared links, so they are quietly important for both ranking and trust. The slugify tool takes any title, strips accents so that "café" becomes "cafe," lowercases everything, and swaps spaces and symbols for clean hyphens, producing a link-ready string in one step. Turning "10 Best Tips for Beginners!" into "10-best-tips-for-beginners" by hand is fiddly; doing it with a button is effortless and consistent.
Counting words and characters, accurately
Word and character counts feel like they should be trivial, yet if you paste the same paragraph into three different tools you will often get three different numbers. Understanding why is the difference between trusting a count and second-guessing it, and it is one area where careful implementation genuinely matters.
Start with characters. Counting them sounds like it cannot go wrong, but it does, because of how computers store text. Many tools count what programmers call code units, and for ordinary letters that matches your intuition. The trouble starts with emoji and certain symbols. A single emoji such as a smiley face is often stored as two code units, so a lazy character count reports it as two characters even though you see one. Accented letters can misbehave too: the letter é might be stored as a single character or as an "e" followed by a separate accent mark, and the two versions count differently. This tool counts actual characters rather than raw storage units, which means an emoji counts as one and your totals match what you see on screen. That is why its numbers can differ, in a good way, from cruder counters.
Word counting has its own puzzle, and it is a global one. In English and most European languages, words are separated by spaces, so you can count words by counting the gaps. But Chinese, Japanese, and some other languages do not put spaces between words, which means a space-based counter would report an entire Chinese sentence as a single word. A thoughtful counter recognises these scripts and counts their characters as individual units, giving a far more sensible total. This tool blends both approaches, counting space-separated words in Western text while treating East Asian characters individually, so its word count stays meaningful no matter which of its six languages you are working in.
Alongside characters and words, the tool reports lines, sentences, paragraphs, and an estimated reading time. The reading estimate is based on a comfortable adult reading speed of around 200 to 250 words per minute; the tool uses roughly 200 as a sensible baseline, so the figure is a fair guide rather than a promise. Sentence and paragraph counts are approximations by nature, since punctuation and spacing vary, but they are close enough to help you judge length and structure at a glance, which is exactly what a live counter is for.
Meet Text & Number Studio
Everything described so far is gathered into a single tool on this page, Text & Number Studio. It was built to be the one place you reach for whenever text needs changing, whether that is a quick case swap, a puzzle to decode, a list to sort, or a paragraph to clean. Instead of hunting through half a dozen single-purpose websites, you type or paste once and pick whatever operation you need.
What it does
The features are organised into clear groups so nothing is hard to find. One group changes case, from uppercase and lowercase to sentence case, title case, alternating, and swap. Another handles sorting and lines, with alphabetical, numeric, length, reverse, shuffle, duplicate removal, and empty-line removal, and a choice of splitting your text by lines, spaces, or commas. A third group is devoted to the letters and numbers conversions at the heart of this article: letters to numbers, numbers to letters, and word value. A fourth cleans and fixes text, including the slugify feature. A fifth offers find and replace, with options to match case or use a regular expression for advanced patterns. Above all of it, a live panel keeps a running count of characters, words, lines, sentences, paragraphs, and reading time as you work.
Built for everyone, in six languages
The interface speaks six languages, with English as the base and full translations for French, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic, including proper right-to-left layout for Arabic. It detects a sensible default language automatically but lets you switch at any time. It is designed to work on any screen, from a wide desktop monitor down to a narrow phone, with buttons that stay easy to tap and a layout that reflows gracefully. There is also a light and dark theme, so it sits comfortably on any page and in any lighting.
Private by design
Perhaps the most reassuring thing about the tool is what it does not do. It never sends your text to a server. Every conversion, sort, and count runs entirely in your own browser, which means your writing, your data, and your puzzles stay on your device and nowhere else. There is no sign-up, no upload, and nothing stored. For anyone pasting in sensitive notes, client details, or unpublished work, that local-only design is not a minor detail, it is the whole point.
How to use it: step by step
Using the tool takes seconds, and the basic flow is always the same.
- Type your text into the box, or paste it in from wherever it came.
- Pick the category you need from the tabs, such as case, sorting, letters and numbers, cleaning, or find and replace.
- Click the button for the exact operation you want. The result appears immediately in the same box.
- Copy the result to your clipboard, or download it as a text file, using the buttons at the bottom.
- If an operation was not what you intended, use undo to step back, then try another. Redo brings a change back if you undo too far.
Because the counts update live and every action is undoable, the tool rewards experimentation. You can chain operations together, for example cleaning a list, removing duplicates, and then sorting it, without fear of making a mess you cannot reverse.
Practical recipes
To show how the pieces fit together, here are a few complete tasks people commonly bring to a tool like this.
- Decode an A1Z26 puzzle. Paste the numbers, separated by hyphens within each word and spaces between words, then use numbers to letters. The hidden message appears at once.
- Encode a short phrase for a game. Type the phrase, choose letters to numbers, and share the numeric version with fellow players to decode.
- Fix text stuck in all caps. Paste the shouting text, then apply sentence case for prose or title case for a heading. Swap case works if only the caps lock was to blame.
- Turn a headline into a URL slug. Type or paste the title and click slugify. Copy the clean, hyphenated result straight into your page's address.
- Tidy a pasted list. Trim spaces, remove empty lines, remove duplicates, then sort A to Z. A chaotic copy-paste becomes a clean, ordered set.
- Count words for an assignment or post. Paste your draft and read the live word count, character count, and estimated reading time without leaving the page.
- Replace a term everywhere. Open find and replace, enter the old and new text, decide whether case should match, and replace all in a single click.
Who uses a tool like this, and why
The reason a combined text and number tool is so handy is that the same few operations show up across wildly different jobs. Here is how various people put it to work.
- Students and teachers use the letters-to-numbers conversion to teach and solve simple ciphers, the word counter to hit assignment limits, and case tools to format titles correctly.
- Writers and editors lean on sentence and title case, trimming and cleaning to fix pasted drafts, and find and replace to enforce consistent terminology.
- Developers and data workers reach for sorting, deduplication, whitespace cleaning, and regular-expression find and replace when wrangling lists, logs, and configuration values.
- Marketers and SEO specialists generate clean slugs, count words for content length, and format headlines, all of which feed directly into how a page reads and ranks.
- Puzzle fans, escape-room designers, and geocachers encode and decode A1Z26 messages constantly, since it is one of the most common clue formats in the hobby.
- Social media managers use case conversion for tone, character counts to fit platform limits, and the odd alternating-case joke when the moment calls for it.
Tips, best practices, and common mistakes
A tool is only as good as the way you use it, so keep these points in mind and you will avoid the pitfalls that trip people up.
First, remember that A1Z26 is not encryption. It is an encoding, meant to be reversible and easy. Never rely on it to hide anything genuinely private, because it offers no real protection at all. Second, watch out for case sensitivity in the wrong places. Usernames, passwords, file paths on some systems, and many database keys treat uppercase and lowercase as different, so normalising case with a single click can be a fix or a bug depending on the context. Think before you flatten. Third, when sorting, be clear whether your items are text or numbers. Sorting "10, 2, 1" as text puts 10 first, which is correct for text but wrong for values; choose numeric sort when the entries are quantities. Fourth, for slugs, shorter is usually better. Trim filler words, keep the meaningful keywords, and let the tool handle the hyphens and accents so the result stays clean and consistent. Finally, treat sentence and paragraph counts as guides, not gospel. They rely on punctuation and spacing that vary between writers, so they are excellent for a quick sense of scale but should not be quoted as exact figures.
Frequently asked questions
How do I convert letters to numbers?
Replace each letter with its position in the alphabet: A is 1, B is 2, and so on to Z, which is 26. You can use the reference chart above, or simply type your text into the tool on this page and click letters to numbers for an instant result.
What is the A = 1, B = 2 system called?
It is commonly known as A1Z26, a name that captures the whole idea at once: A maps to 1 and Z maps to 26. It is the most popular simple letter-to-number scheme and the default meaning when people talk about converting letters to numbers.
How do I convert numbers back into letters?
Match each number to the letter in that alphabet position, so 1 becomes A, 20 becomes T, and 26 becomes Z. In the tool, paste the numbers with hyphens inside each word and spaces between words, then click numbers to letters, and it will rebuild the original text exactly.
Is converting letters to numbers a secure code?
No. A1Z26 is an encoding, not encryption. It is perfect for puzzles, games, and teaching, but anyone familiar with it can decode a message in moments. Do not use it to protect anything that truly needs to stay confidential.
What is the difference between title case and sentence case?
Title case capitalises the first letter of every word, which suits headings and names, for example "Hello World." Sentence case capitalises only the first letter of each sentence, matching normal prose, for example "Hello world." The tool offers both as separate buttons.
How is a URL slug created?
A slug is made by lowercasing the text, removing accents and punctuation, and replacing spaces with hyphens, leaving a short, readable string. The slugify feature does all of this in one step, turning a title like "My Best Recipe!" into "my-best-recipe."
Why do word counters give different numbers for the same text?
They handle characters and languages differently. Some count internal storage units rather than real characters, which throws off totals for emoji and accented letters, and simple counters miscount languages that do not use spaces between words. This tool counts real characters and handles East Asian scripts, so its numbers reflect what you actually see.
Is my text private, and does the tool work without an account?
Your text is private. Everything runs inside your own browser, nothing is uploaded, and there is no account or sign-up. You can use every feature freely, and your writing never leaves your device.
Which languages does the tool support?
Six: English as the base, plus French, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic, the last with full right-to-left support. It detects a default automatically and lets you switch languages whenever you like.
Bringing it all together
Converting letters to numbers began as a very old idea, a way of finding meaning and order by giving each letter a value, and it survives today as one of the friendliest little puzzles in everyday life. Understanding it properly means knowing that A1Z26 counts alphabet positions, that character codes are a different beast entirely, and that the reverse conversion works cleanly as long as the numbers are written without ambiguity. Around that core sit the everyday tasks that always seem to accompany it: switching case, sorting and cleaning lists, building slugs, and counting text with numbers you can trust.
The tool on this page pulls all of that into one private, multilingual, browser-based workspace, so the next time you need to decode a clue, tidy a pasted mess, format a headline, or simply find out how long your writing is, the answer is a click away. Bookmark it, keep the reference charts handy, and let the letters and numbers cross the bridge between them whenever you need them to.