Word Frequency Counter
Analyse word frequency in any text. See a sorted table and visual chart of the most common words with options to filter common words and set minimum length.
How the Word Frequency Counter Works
Paste any block of text, choose your filters, and the tool produces a ranked table of the 20 most-frequent words. Each row shows the word, the number of occurrences, a horizontal bar showing relative frequency against the top word, and the percentage of total words. Three controls shape the result: 'Ignore Common Words' filters out 60 stop words like 'the', 'and', 'is', 'of'; 'Case Sensitive' decides whether 'Apple' and 'apple' merge or stay separate; 'Minimum Word Length' lets you exclude short connectives if the stop-word list misses any.
The total word count and unique word count appear at the top of the results. The ratio between them is a rough lexical diversity score: 1,000 total words with 300 unique words gives a 30% type-token ratio, which is normal for general prose. Below 20% suggests heavy repetition; above 50% suggests very varied vocabulary. Punctuation is stripped before counting, so 'cat,' and 'cat.' both count as 'cat'.
Editing With Frequency Data
An editor checking a 5,000-word feature for accidental repetition pastes the manuscript, ticks Ignore Common Words, and immediately sees that 'really' appears 47 times - a clear filler-word habit to fix. A content marketer auditing a blog post for SEO keyword density wants to see the target keyword in the top three but not above 3% (a sign of stuffing). A linguistics student profiling the vocabulary of a 19th-century novel turns off the stop-word filter to study how prose-glue words like 'said' and 'thou' actually distribute.
A few caveats: the top-20 cap means very long documents (10,000+ words) may need multiple analyses to dig deeper. Hyphenated compounds like 'self-aware' get split into 'self' and 'aware' because the regex strips non-alphanumeric characters. Contractions like 'don't' become 'dont'. For a rougher overview that includes reading time and the top five content words, [Word Counter](/word-counter) is the lighter-weight sibling of this tool.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are some short words still showing despite the stop-word filter?
The built-in stop-word list covers around 60 of the most common English filler words. It is deliberately not exhaustive - words like 'just', 'really', 'very' and 'actually' are left in because they often signal a writer's voice tic worth flagging. To exclude additional words, raise the Minimum Word Length filter, or run a [Find and Replace](/find-and-replace) pass to strip the words you do not want counted before pasting.
How does it handle plurals and verb conjugations?
It treats them as separate words. 'Cat' and 'cats' are two different entries; 'run' and 'running' and 'ran' are three. This is unusual for academic linguistics tools (which often lemmatise) but is the behaviour writers actually want for editing - you usually do want to see both 'cat' and 'cats' as separate counts because their narrative functions differ.
What is a healthy keyword density for SEO?
Most SEO guides recommend 1-3% for the primary keyword. Below 1% suggests the keyword is barely present; above 3% reads as keyword-stuffed and may trigger Google's spam classifiers. Use the percentage column to check your target keyword sits in this band. Modern Google ranking factors weight content quality and topic relevance far more than raw density, so do not optimise to four decimal places.
Does it count compound words correctly?
Hyphenated compounds like 'mother-in-law' or 'self-aware' get split into their parts because punctuation is stripped before counting. Solid compounds like 'mailbox' or 'sunset' count as single words because there is no separator. Open compounds like 'high school' count as two separate words. There is no settings switch for this; if you need accurate compound counting, replace your hyphens with a placeholder before pasting.
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