Word Frequency Counter
Count how often each word appears in any text. See a full ranked frequency table with counts and percentages, filter out stop words, toggle case sensitivity, and set a minimum word length — all updating live as you type. Free, private, and runs entirely in your browser.
Your Text & Options
The frequency table updates liveFrequency Results
Live analysisStart typing or paste text on the left. The ranked word frequency table will appear here — updated live as you type.
What does this Word Frequency Counter do?
A word frequency counter analyses a piece of text and tells you how often each distinct word appears. Instead of just giving you a single number, it builds a ranked table: the most-used words at the top, each with its exact count and what percentage of the total text it represents. It's the quickest way to see what a document is actually "about" at the vocabulary level, and to spot repetition you might not notice by eye.
This tool does the counting entirely in your browser. The text is tokenised by splitting on whitespace, stripping punctuation and symbols from the edges of each token, and treating hyphenated words like well-known as a single term. You can then shape the results with a few controls: ignore case so that "The" and "the" count together, exclude stop words so that common filler doesn't dominate the list, require a minimum word length to filter out short fragments, and choose how the results are sorted and how many to show.
Everything updates live as you type, with no button to press and no server round-trip. The text never leaves your device.
How to use the Word Frequency Counter
- Paste or type your text into the textarea on the left. You can paste from any source — a document, a webpage, an email, or a code file.
- Watch the frequency table populate instantly in the panel on the right. There's no "analyse" button; every option recalculates the table as you change it.
- Adjust the options to shape the analysis. Turn off "Ignore case" if capitalisation matters. Turn off "Exclude stop words" if you want to see everything, including common filler words.
- Set a minimum word length to filter out short tokens like "a", "an", "is", and "to".
- Choose a sort order and how many rows to display.
- Export the results with "Copy as CSV" or "Copy Summary".
Why use this Word Frequency Counter?
Live, instant updates
Every option change recalculates the table immediately. No button, no page reload — the results just update as you type.
Stop-word filtering
Toggle off the filler words to reveal the terms that actually carry meaning in your text. A built-in list of 100+ English stop words is included.
Percentage + raw counts
Each row shows both the raw count and the percentage of the total, so you can see relative importance at a glance.
Inline visual bars
A subtle bar behind each word makes the relative frequency obvious without a separate chart. Longer bar = more frequent word.
CSV export
Copy the full table as tab-separated values and paste it straight into any spreadsheet app for further analysis.
100% private
Everything runs in your browser. Your text never leaves your device — no server, no logs, no tracking.
Who uses a word frequency counter?
Writers and editors
- Spot overused words — the ones that appear 20 times when 3 would do
- Find unintentional repetition in a draft before publishing
- Check whether a piece is leaning too heavily on a particular term
- Compare vocabulary richness between two versions of the same text
SEO specialists and content marketers
- See which terms actually dominate a page's content
- Check whether the target keyword is present at a reasonable frequency
- Spot keyword over-optimisation
- Analyse competitor pages to understand their topical focus
Students and researchers
- Analyse the vocabulary of a source text or corpus
- Compare writing styles across different authors or periods
- Find the key terms in a research paper
- Study the difficulty of a text by looking at how often rare words appear
Data analysts and journalists
- Find the dominant themes in a set of survey responses or comments
- Analyse interview transcripts to surface recurring topics
- Spot patterns in log files or error messages
- Extract the most frequent terms from a large batch of text
How to interpret the results
The frequency table is simple on the surface — word, count, percentage — but the patterns it reveals are what makes it useful. Here's what to look for.
1. A single word dominating the list
If one word appears far more often than anything else, that's the dominant term. In a topical blog post, that's usually the target keyword and it's expected. In a general essay, it might be a sign that you've leaned on the same word too hard. If your target keyword appears at more than about 3–4% frequency, that's usually a sign of over-optimisation for SEO.
2. A long tail of one-hit wonders
Most natural text has a handful of very frequent words and a long tail of words that appear only once. If nearly all words in your text appear only once, the vocabulary is unusually rich — or the text is very short.
3. Stop words dominating
If you turn off "Exclude stop words", the top of the list will almost always be the same: the, of, and, to, a, in, is. That's normal English. It's exactly why the filter exists.
4. Proper nouns
A capitalised word near the top of the list often reveals the subject matter: a person, place, product, or brand. When "Ignore case" is on, this signal is lost — which is why the option to turn it off exists.
5. Words that should be there but aren't
Sometimes the most useful insight is what's missing. If you're writing about a specific topic and its main term doesn't appear in the top 20, that's a signal that the text isn't focused on what you think it is.
| What you see | What it likely means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| One word at 5%+ frequency | Possible over-optimisation or overuse | Replace some instances with synonyms or rephrase |
| Top word at 1–3% | Healthy topical focus | No change needed |
| All words appear once | Very short text, or an unusually rich vocabulary | Check the total word count |
| Stop words fill the top 5 | Stop-word filter is off | Turn it on to see meaningful terms |
| A capitalised word near the top | Proper noun — likely the main subject | Turn off "Ignore case" to confirm |
| Expected term missing entirely | Text isn't focused on that topic | Rewrite the intro or add the relevant term |
What are stop words?
Stop words are the highest-frequency words in a language — the grammatical glue that holds sentences together. In English they include articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (and, or, but), prepositions (of, in, to, for), pronouns (I, you, it, they), and common verbs (is, are, was, have).
In any natural text, these words occupy the top of a raw frequency list — which is precisely why they're not useful for analysis. Filtering them out reveals the words that actually carry meaning.
This tool ships with a built-in stop-word list of over 100 common English words. You can toggle the filter on or off with a single click.