Word frequency counter
Paste text to see which words and phrases appear most often, with counts and percentages, and leave out common stop words in your language.
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Paste text to begin.
- Words in the text
- 0
- Counted
- 0
- Different ones
- 0
| No. | Word | Count | Percent |
|---|
Text up to a few million characters. Words are runs of letters and digits, with apostrophes and hyphens inside a word kept; phrases never run across a sentence end or a new line. Stop-word lists are short lists of the most common function words, not full dictionaries, and exist for English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese (Brazil), Italian, Indonesian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Russian, Polish and Hindi.
How to count word frequency
- Paste your text.
- Choose single words, two-word phrases or three-word phrases, and a stop-word language if you want to skip words such as the, and or of.
- Read the ranked list with counts and percentages, then copy it or download it as CSV.
How word frequency is counted
The text is split into words, each word is lowercased, and the tool counts how many times each one appears. The ranked list puts the most frequent first and breaks ties alphabetically. Counting how often words repeat is a quick way to see what a text is really about, to check whether a keyword is overused, to find the terms in an interview or a set of survey answers, or to spot a habit such as leaning on the same word in an essay.
Without any filtering, the top of the list is nearly always function words such as the, of and and. Choosing a stop-word language removes them, so the content words rise to the top. The lists cover the most common articles, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and auxiliary verbs of the language and are meant for a quick look, not for linguistic work.
Phrases are counted as runs of two or three words next to each other, inside one sentence. Repeated phrases are often more telling than single words: they reveal the product names, slogans and set expressions in a text. With stop words switched on, phrases that begin or end with a stop word are dropped, so what remains are more meaningful.
The percentage of an item is its count divided by the total counted. That total changes with the options, because stop words and numbers that are left out are not counted. Download the CSV to keep the full list or to chart it in a spreadsheet.
Tips
- For totals of words, characters, sentences and reading time, use the word counter.
- Make the counts case-sensitive in your own way by changing case first with the case converter.
- Clean a list of repeated items with Remove duplicate lines.
Questions
What counts as a word?
A run of letters or digits, which may contain an apostrophe or a hyphen between letters, so don't and well-known are one word each. Upper and lower case are treated as the same word. Punctuation and spaces separate words.
How are phrases counted?
A two-word phrase is every pair of words that appear next to each other, and a three-word phrase is every such triple. Phrases do not run across a full stop, question mark, semicolon or line break, so the last word of one sentence is not joined to the first word of the next.
What do the stop-word options do?
Stop words are very common function words such as the, and, of, el, la, le, der or и. For single words they are left out of the list. For phrases, any phrase that starts or ends with a stop word is left out, so you see phrases like search engine instead of of the search. The percentages are worked out on what is left.
How is the percentage worked out?
It is the item's count divided by the total number of words (or phrases) counted, after stop words and numbers have been left out if you chose that.
What is in the CSV file?
The whole ranked list, not just the part on screen, with the columns rank, word, count and percent. The file is UTF-8 with a byte order mark so that spreadsheets show accented letters correctly.
Is my text uploaded?
No. The text is counted in your browser and nothing leaves your device.