What the duplicate word finder does
Repetition creeps into writing without you noticing. You type “the the” when you change a sentence halfway through. You use the same adjective three times in one paragraph. Spell checkers often miss both, because every word is spelled correctly.
This tool looks for two kinds of repetition:
- Doubled words: the same word written twice or more in a row, such as “to to” or “is is is”. These are nearly always typing mistakes, and the tool can remove them for you.
- Repeated words: words that appear many times anywhere in the text. These are not errors, but they can make writing feel flat. The tool lists them with a count and highlights every use.
How to use it
- Paste your text into Your text.
- Look at Doubled words on the right. If any are found, press Remove doubled words to fix them all at once.
- Check Repeated words. Each chip shows a word and how many times it appears, such as “pond ×4”.
- Select a word chip to highlight only that word in the preview below. Select it again to go back to highlighting all repeats.
- Use Flag words used at least this many times to raise the bar. Set it to 3 or 4 for long texts.
- Switch Ignore common words off if you also want to see words such as “the”, “and” and “to”.
The preview at the bottom shows your text with repeated words highlighted in color and doubled words underlined with a wavy line.
How it works
For doubled words, the tool looks for a word followed by spaces and then the same word again. Case is ignored, so “That that” is caught. A line break between the two words also counts, which catches the classic mistake where the first copy ends one line and the second copy starts the next. Pairs made only of digits, such as “1 1”, are skipped, because they are usually intentional in lists and codes.
For repeated words, it splits the text into words, lowercases them, and counts each one. With Ignore common words on, a built-in list of about 200 frequent English words, such as articles, pronouns and helper verbs, is left out of the count. Words joined by an apostrophe or hyphen, such as “don’t” and “well-known”, count as one word.
Example
Here is the sample text that loads with the tool:
Our new garden was a big project. We planned the the garden for months, and the garden now has a pond. The pond is small, but the pond attracts frogs. Next year we want to to add a bench next to the pond.
| What the tool finds | Result |
|---|---|
| Doubled words | “the the” and “to to” |
| Repeated words (common words ignored) | pond ×4, garden ×3, next ×2 |
| Repeated words (common words included, 3 or more) | the ×6, pond ×4, a ×3, garden ×3, to ×3 |
After Remove doubled words, the text reads: “We planned the garden for months” and “Next year we want to add a bench next to the pond.” Nothing else changes.
In another test, “Paris in the the spring. That that is is fine. Had had cases.” gives four doubles: “the the”, “That that”, “is is” and “Had had”.
When a doubled word is correct
English has a few constructions where the same word really does appear twice:
- had had: “She had had enough by noon.”
- that that: “He said that that was the plan.”
- is is: “What the problem is is the cost.” This is informal but common in speech.
The tool cannot tell these apart from typos, so it flags them all. Read each one in the preview before you press the remove button, or fix them by hand in the text box.
Tips for fixing repeated words
- Replace some uses with a pronoun: “the pond” can become “it” once the reader knows what you mean.
- Use a more specific word: “the garden” might be “the vegetable bed” or “the lawn”.
- Merge sentences that repeat the same subject.
- Keep key terms consistent. In technical or legal writing, repeating the exact term is often better than switching to a synonym that could confuse the reader.
Limits
- The tool counts exact word forms, so “garden” and “gardens” are counted separately.
- Very long documents are checked after a short pause in typing, to keep the page responsive.
- The common word list is English only. For other languages, switch it off.
For a full ranked table of every word with percentages, use the word frequency counter. To remove repeated lines in a list rather than repeated words, try the duplicate line remover. To check sentence lengths at the same time, paste your draft into the online sentence counter.
Other ways to find repeated words
Microsoft Word flags some doubled words as “Repeated word” in its spelling check, but it does not list words you overuse. Google Docs does the same in some languages. With Find (Ctrl+F) you can count one word at a time. In code, a regular expression such as \b(\w+)\s+\1\b with the case-insensitive flag finds doubled words in most editors that support regular expressions.