Word Frequency Counter
Analyze word frequency in text with counts and percentages.
Counts how often each word appears in a text and what share of the words it makes up — to spot overused words in writing, check keyword use in web copy, or study vocabulary in a document.
How to use it
- Count — single words, or phrases of two or three words in a row, which shows the keyword phrases a page leans on.
- Minimum word length — ignores shorter words; 3 by default.
- Ignore case — on by default: “The” and “the” count as one word.
- Remove stop words — on by default: leaves out about 130 common English words such as “the”, “and”, “is” and “with”.
- Top results — how many rows to show; 50 by default. Sort by frequency or A–Z.
Copy as CSV copies the rows shown, one per line, as word, count and percentage.
How words are counted
A word is a run of letters, digits and apostrophes in any language, so “don't” is one word, with a straight or curly apostrophe, and a hyphen splits “e-mail” into two. Quote marks around a word are not part of it. Percentages are shares of the words that pass the filters, not of every word in the text.
A phrase is words exactly as they follow one another, within a sentence: it never runs across a full stop, question or exclamation mark, colon, semicolon or line break, though it does run across a comma. The length and stop-word filters apply to a phrase's first and last word only, so “bread and butter” is counted while “of the” is not. No word is removed before phrases are formed, so every phrase listed appears in the text. A phrase's percentage is its share of the phrases counted.
Examples
With the default options
- Text
- The cat sat on the mat. The cat saw another cat, and the mat was red.
- cat
- 3 (33.33%)
- mat
- 2 (22.22%)
- sat
- 1 (11.11%)
- saw
- 1 (11.11%)
- another
- 1 (11.11%)
- red
- 1 (11.11%)
“On” is shorter than three letters, and “the”, “and” and “was” are stop words, so they are left out.
2-word phrases
The same text with Count set to 2-word phrases:
- cat sat
- 1 (25%)
- cat saw
- 1 (25%)
- saw another
- 1 (25%)
- another cat
- 1 (25%)
Pairs that start or end with a stop word, such as “the cat”, are left out, and no pair joins the end of one sentence to the start of the next.
See also
- Word & Character Counter — for totals of words, characters and sentences.
- Find and Replace — to swap an overused word for another.