Word Frequency Counter
Count word frequency in any text. Paste content to see how often each word appears, useful for analysis, editing, and keyword research.
Enter your Words
RESULT:
What this does
Ever wondered which words you lean on most? This tool shows you. Paste your text and it lists every word alongside the number of times it appears, so the repetition in a piece becomes plain to see. It is the difference between sensing you have overused a word and knowing it appeared eleven times.
How to use it
- Type or paste your text into the box on the left.
- Press Get Frequency, and the list of words and counts fills the panel on the right.
- Press Clear when you want to empty both sides and start over.
As with the rest of these tools, the work happens in your browser, so your text is never sent off anywhere.
How it counts the words
A few sensible things happen to your text before it is counted, and knowing them helps the results make sense. First, everything is read in lower case, so The, the, and THE are all treated as the same word and added together rather than listed separately. Second, punctuation is stripped out, so dog and dog, are counted as one and the same. Then the text is split into words and each one is tallied. Common little words like the, a, and and are all included, nothing is filtered out.
What it is good for
This is a quiet workhorse for anyone who edits their own writing. Run a draft through it and the words you overuse jump out, those crutch words and pet phrases we all repeat without noticing, so you can vary them and tighten the prose. For people writing for the web, it doubles as a keyword check, letting you see how often a key term shows up so you can judge whether you have used it enough, or leaned on it too hard. It is also handy for plain text analysis, when you simply want to understand what a body of text is made of and which words carry it.
Reading the results
Two things will help you get the most from the list. The words are shown in the order they first turn up in your text, not ranked from most frequent to least, so the biggest counts are scattered through the list rather than sitting neatly at the top. Scan down the numbers to find them. And because the common connecting words are left in, words like the and and often carry the highest counts of all. That is expected, so let your eye skip past them to the meaningful words underneath, the nouns and verbs that actually tell you what the writing is about.
If you want a keyword density figure from this, it is a quick sum. Take a word's count and divide it by your total number of words.
keyword density = word count ÷ total words
Questions people ask
Does it show keyword density?
It gives you the raw count for each word, which is the hard part. For density, divide a word's count by the total number of words in your text.
Are the results sorted by most frequent?
No, they appear in the order each word first shows up in your text. Read down the counts to pick out the ones that appear most.
Is it case sensitive?
No. Words are counted in lower case, so the same word in different capitalisations is merged into a single tally.
Does it leave out common words like the and and?
No, every word is counted, common ones included. They usually top the list, so simply look past them to the words that matter for your purpose.
Sarayu is an Assistant Lecturer at Herald College, currently studying Masters of Engineering at KU. She is a Software engineer and educator who enjoys writing, and publishes essays and articles. She helps to review word/text utilities for clarity and usability.