What a word frequency counter shows
A word frequency counter tells you how often each word appears in a piece of text. The result is a ranked list: the most used word first, then the next, down to words that appear only once.
That list is useful in more ways than you might expect. Writers use it to catch words they lean on too much. Students use it to study the vocabulary of a speech or a novel. People who write for search engines use it to check how often a key phrase appears. Researchers use it as a first look at survey answers or interview notes.
How to use it
- Paste your text into Your text. The tool opens with a short paragraph about coffee so you can see how it works.
- Under Count, choose Single words, Two-word phrases or Three-word phrases.
- Choose your Options:
- Ignore common words (on by default) leaves out words like “the”, “and” and “of”.
- Ignore case (on by default) counts “Coffee” and “coffee” as the same word.
- Include numbers (off by default) counts numbers such as 2024 as words.
- Set Shortest word to count (letters) if you want to skip short words. A value of 4 skips everything with three letters or fewer.
- Read the table. # is the rank, Count is how many times the item appears and Share is its percentage.
- Press Copy to copy the list as three tab separated columns, or CSV to download a file for Excel or Google Sheets.
Above the table, Counted is the total number of words or phrases included, Different is how many unique items there are and Top item is the most frequent one.
Examples
These results come from the sample paragraph the tool opens with.
| Settings | Counted | Different | Top results |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single words, ignore common words | 36 | 30 | coffee 6 (16.7%), roast 2 (5.6%), bean 1 (2.8%) |
| Single words, common words included | 60 | 43 | coffee 6 (10.0%), the 6 (10.0%), of 3 (5.0%) |
| Two-word phrases, ignore common words | 18 | 17 | roast coffee 2 (11.1%), beans inside 1 (5.6%) |
| Two-word phrases, common words included | 55 | 52 | of the 3 (5.5%), roast coffee 2 (3.6%) |
The first row shows why the common word filter is on by default. Without it, “the” ties with “coffee” at the top, and the list tells you less about what the paragraph is actually about.
How the counting works
The text is split into words. A word is a run of letters and digits, and it can contain an apostrophe or a hyphen, so “it’s” and “well-known” each count as one word. Curly apostrophes are treated the same as straight ones. Punctuation around words is ignored.
For phrases, the tool first splits the text at sentence breaks: full stops, question marks, exclamation marks, colons, semicolons, brackets and line breaks. Then it slides a window of two or three words along each piece. With Ignore common words on, a phrase is skipped if it starts or ends with a common word, so you get “roast coffee” but not “of the” or “the coffee”. Common words in the middle are kept, which means phrases such as “cup of tea” still appear in the three-word list.
The share percentage is calculated against the Counted total, not against every word in the text. When you ignore common words, they are removed from both the list and the total.
Tips and limits
- Different forms count separately. “bean” and “beans” are two entries, and so are “run”, “runs” and “running”. The tool does not merge word forms, because doing that reliably needs a dictionary for each language.
- Check for overuse. In a short article, any ordinary word that appears much more often than the others is worth a second look. The duplicate word finder highlights each repeated word in your text, so you can see where it occurs.
- Keyword density. For search engine writing, choose Two-word phrases or Three-word phrases to find how often a key phrase appears. There is no ideal percentage. Write for the reader and use the phrase where it fits naturally.
- See it as a picture. The word cloud generator uses the same counts and draws the most frequent words largest.
- Count sentences too. For sentence length, reading time and paragraph counts, use the sentence counter.
- Other languages. Counting works with any language that separates words with spaces, including accented letters. The common word list is English only, so switch it off for other languages.
Other ways to count word frequency
Microsoft Word. Word has no frequency list. You can count one word at a time with Find (Ctrl+F), which shows the number of results in the navigation pane.
Excel and Google Sheets. Paste one word per row in column A. In Google Sheets, =QUERY(A:A, "select A, count(A) where A <> '' group by A order by count(A) desc") gives a ranked table. In Excel, a PivotTable with the word as both the row and the value (set to Count) does the same.
Code. In Python, collections.Counter(text.lower().split()).most_common(20) lists the top 20 words, though it keeps punctuation attached to words. In JavaScript, split the text with a regular expression and add each word to a Map, then sort the entries by count.