Count how many times a word, phrase or character appears

How to use Count Occurrences

1. Paste the text to search into Your text.
2. Type the target into Word, phrase or character.
3. Tick Case sensitive only if “Apple” and “apple” should count separately.
4. Leave Whole words only ticked to skip matches inside longer words, or untick it to catch every match.
5. Tick Count overlapping matches for repeated patterns such as “ana” in “banana”.
6. Read Occurrences and Per 100 words, then use the Positions table to find each match.

What it does and when to use it

This tool answers “how many times?” for one thing you choose. Common uses:

• checking how often a brand name or keyword appears in a page you are writing;
• counting a character name in a chapter, or a term in a contract;
• counting commas, semicolons or a letter in a puzzle;
• finding every place a word appears, by line and column, before you edit it.

The Per 100 words figure lets you compare texts of different lengths. Three mentions in a 150-word product blurb (2 per 100) is very different from three in a 3,000-word article (0.1 per 100).

If you want counts for every word at once, open the Word Frequency Analyzer. To change the matches rather than count them, use Find and Replace. For counts of characters and words in general, the Character Counter is quicker.

How it works

The tool searches the text from start to end for your exact characters. With Case sensitive off, upper and lower case are treated as equal. With Whole words only on, a match must not touch a letter, digit or underscore on either side. Each match is recorded with its position, which is turned into a line number and a column (both starting at 1). The search runs in your browser.

Worked examples

The first two examples use this two-line text: “Cat food. The cat sleeps.” then “Catalogue of cats.”

Whole words (default). Searching for “cat” finds “Cat” at line 1, column 1 and “cat” at line 1, column 15: Occurrences: 2, which is 25 per 100 words. “Catalogue” and “cats” are skipped.

Inside other words. Untick Whole words only and the count rises to 4. The new matches are in “Catalogue” and “cats”, and the table shows the third one as 3 | 2 | 1 | Cat: match 3, line 2, column 1.

Overlapping. Search “banana” for “ana” with Whole words only off. Without overlapping you get 1 match. With Count overlapping matches ticked, the second “ana” that shares the middle “a” is found too: Occurrences: 2.

Limits and tips

• The Positions table lists the first 1,000 matches; the count itself goes far higher.
• Line numbers count every line break, including blank lines, so they match what a text editor shows.
• To count how often each different word repeats, try the Duplicate Word Finder.