Word Frequency Counter
See which words appear most often, ranked by how many times — with common words filtered out and repeated phrases counted too.
Your text
Letters per word.
The rest are counted, just not listed.
Ranking
| # | Term | Count | Share | Proportion |
|---|
Private by design. This page has no backend. Your text is counted by JavaScript running on your own device and is never sent anywhere.
What gets counted as a word
The text is split wherever there is a space or a punctuation mark, so
well-known counts as well and known, and
don't counts as don and t. Apostrophes are the
awkward case in every counter of this kind; splitting on them is the behaviour that
keeps possessives from inflating the count of the noun they hang off.
Accents are kept as typed, so café and cafe are two
different words. Case is folded together by default, which is why The at
the start of a sentence adds to the count of the; the second option turns
that off when the distinction matters.
Words, pairs and triples
Counting single words tells you the subject. Counting pairs and triples of adjacent words tells you the habits: the phrase you reach for three times a page, the filler that has crept into every paragraph. A pair only counts when both of its words survive the filters, so turning on the common-word filter changes the pair list considerably.
The common-word filter
Off by default, every word is counted, and the top of the list will be
the, of and and — which is true but not
interesting. Turn it on and roughly a hundred and eighty English function words are
skipped, which brings the words that carry the meaning to the top. The list is fixed
and English-only; for other languages, raise the shortest-word setting instead, which
gets you most of the way there.
Shortest to count and how many rows
Shortest to count drops words below the length you set, which is the blunt way to remove function words in any language. How many rows only limits the table: everything is still counted, and the totals above the table are totals for the whole text, not for the rows shown.
Share
The percentage is that term's count against the total number of counted terms — after the filters, not before. A share above about five per cent for a single content word usually means the text leans on it heavily.
Common uses
Checking an article for repeated words before publishing, finding the keywords in a page of copy, spotting verbal tics in a transcript, comparing the vocabulary of two drafts, and getting a quick sense of what a long document is actually about.
How to use the Word Frequency Counter
- Paste the text you want to analyse.
- Choose single words, or two- and three-word phrases.
- Optionally filter common words and set a minimum length, then read the ranked table.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a word?
Runs of letters and numbers, with punctuation stripped, so 'word,' and 'word' are counted together.
Can it show phrases instead of single words?
Yes. Switch to pairs or triples to rank the most frequent two- and three-word phrases.
Can I ignore common words like 'the' and 'and'?
Yes. A stop-word filter hides the most common English words so the interesting terms stand out.