Word frequency counter — rank every word by how often it appears

How to use the word frequency counter

1. Paste or type your text into Your text. The ranking updates as you type.
2. Keep Ignore case ticked so “River” and “river” count as one word, or untick it to count them apart.
3. Tick Exclude common words (the, and, of …) to hide filler words and see the topic words.
4. Raise Minimum word length to skip short words, and set Show top to the number of rows you want (1 to 5,000).
5. Read the summary, the Top 15 bar chart and the Frequency table, and download the table as CSV if you need it.

What it does and when to use it

The tool answers one question: which words does this text lean on most? Writers use it to spot a pet word that turns up in every paragraph. Students use it to find the key terms in a reading. Marketers use it to see whether a page really talks about its subject, or just repeats it.

The summary shows Words counted (the total after filters), Unique words and the Most frequent word with its count.

If you only want the repeated words, the Duplicate Word Finder shows just those. For a plain list of every different word, use the Unique Word Extractor. For letters rather than words, try Letter Frequency.

How it works

The text is split into words. A word is a run of letters or digits, and it may contain an apostrophe or hyphen inside it, so “don’t” and “well-known” are one word each. With Ignore case on, words are lowercased first.

Next the filters apply. Words shorter than the minimum length are skipped, and so are words on the common-word list if you ticked that option. The remaining words are tallied and sorted by count, highest first. The share is count ÷ words counted × 100, rounded to two decimal places. It all runs in your browser.

Worked examples

A famous line. “To be or not to be, that is the question.” gives Words counted: 10 and Unique words: 8. The first row is 1 | be | 2 | 20%, and “to” is second with the same 20%. The tie is broken alphabetically.

Same line, common words excluded. Almost every word in that line is a function word. Only “question” survives, so the result is Words counted: 1 and “question” holds 100%.

Minimum length and top rows. “Cloud storage beats local storage when cloud costs fall.” with Minimum word length 5 and Show top 3 counts 7 words. The table shows cloud 2 (28.57%), storage | 2 | 28.57% and beats 1 (14.29%).

Limits and tips

• Different forms of a word are counted apart: “run”, “runs” and “running” are three rows.
• The common-word list is English. For other languages, raise the minimum length instead to push short function words out.
• The chart always shows at most 15 bars, even when the table is longer.
• Check total length with the Word Counter before judging shares; in a short text one extra use changes a percentage a lot.