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Delete words containing Latin characters

Delete words with Latin letters or numbers from Excel cells
«Only Latin» removes words made of Latin letters alone, «Any Latin» also mixed ones like «ps5» or «A4». The number modes work the same way.

Need to delete words with Latin letters in Excel? This page shows how to do it instantly with !SEMTools — no formulas, no helper columns.

What the “Delete words with Latin” tool does

The tool removes words in selected cells based on Latin letters (A–Z, a–z). You choose one of two modes:

  • containing Latin chars (at least 1): deletes any word that has at least one Latin letter (e.g., modelX, v2alpha, hello).
  • containing only Latin chars: deletes words that consist only of Latin letters (no digits, symbols or other alphabets), e.g., hello, Brand. Mixed tokens like x200 or alpha-1 are not deleted in this mode.

word delimiter: a regular space character (“ ”). Custom delimiters are not supported for this tool.

Ignore punctuation option

There is a checkbox to ignore punctuation. When it’s on, punctuation is skipped during matching, as if words had no punctuation inside or around them. This helps catch things like quotes or commas attached to words.

Text:  "hello," world! v2alpha test-123
Mode:  containing only Latin chars
Ignore punctuation: ON
Deletes: “hello,”, “world!”
Keeps:  “test-123”, “v2alpha” (have digits, other words are deleted, because they have only latin chars and quotes, quotes are skipped)

How to delete words with Latin characters in !SEMTools

  1. Select the cells or the whole column you want to clean.
  2. Open DELETE → Words → By substring… → Containing…
  3. Choose:
    • Latin characters, for words with at least one Latin letter, or
    • only latin characters, for words made of Latin letters alone.
  4. (Optional) Tick Ignore punctuation in the first group of the tab if you don’t want punctuation to affect matching.
  5. Confirm to delete words directly in place.

Before and after examples

example 1 — containing Latin chars (at least 1)

Before:  id45 hello 123 modelX beta-2
Rule:    delete any word that has at least one Latin letter
After: 123

example 2 — containing only Latin chars

Before:  hello 2024 alpha-1 X99 test
Rule:    delete words made only of A–Z letters
After: 2024 alpha-1 X99

Tips and edge cases

  • spaces matter: the tool treats words as space-separated. If you have irregular spacing, first replace your delimiter with regular whitespace character.
  • punctuation setting: with ignore punctuation on, the tool strips punctuation for matching but keeps your original punctuation in place for non-deleted words.
  • case-insensitive: matching ignores case (A=a).
  • numbers: pure numbers (e.g., 2024) are kept in both modes.

Want to delete words with Latin letters in seconds?
!SEMTools does it in place and helps with hundreds of other text tasks.

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