Word frequency counter

What the word frequency counter does

Paste any text and this tool tells you how many times each word appears, ranked from most repeated to least. Every word comes with its raw count and the percentage it takes up in the whole text. It is the fastest way to see what a piece of writing is actually about: the words at the top are usually the topic.

Writers use it to catch crutch words and accidental repetition, SEOs use it to check keyword density in an article, researchers use it to summarise open survey answers, and teachers use it to study the vocabulary of a passage. Everything runs inside your browser — the text is never uploaded to a server.

How to use it

1. Type or paste your text into the box.
2. Tune the options for what you need:
   • Case sensitive: when on, House and house are counted separately.
   • Ignore common stopwords: drops filler words (the, and, of, a…) so only meaningful words rise to the top. Pick the language of the list.
   • Minimum characters per word: hides short words; a minimum of 3 skips a, to, of, and similar.
3. Read the table sorted by frequency, and copy the whole table with one click to drop it into a spreadsheet.

How words are counted

• The text is split into words on letters and numbers; punctuation such as ., ,, ;, ! acts only as a separator and is discarded.
• By default everything is lowercased, so Cat and cat are the same word.
• Accented letters are kept in the word shown (café stays café), but accents are ignored when matching the stopword list, so Spanish más is still recognised as filler.
• The percentage is count ÷ total counted words × 100. All percentages add up to 100%.

Worked example

Take this short passage with mixed punctuation:

The cat and the dog. The cat runs and the dog sleeps. Cat cat cat.

With case folding on and no filters, the counter finds 15 words in total and 6 unique words. The word cat appears five times (the three at the end plus the two earlier ones, treating Cat and cat as equal), which is 33.3% of the text; the appears four times (26.7%); and and dog twice each (13.3%). The remaining words, runs and sleeps, appear once, at 6.7% each. Those are exactly the numbers in the table above, and they sum to 100%.

Now turn on ignore stopwords (English). The filler words the and and drop out, the total falls to 9, and the list becomes cat (5 → 55.6%), dog (2), runs, sleeps. In one step it becomes obvious that the passage is about a cat and a dog.

Frequently asked questions

What are stopwords?

Stopwords are very common words that carry little meaning on their own — articles, prepositions and conjunctions like the, and, of, a, in, and their Spanish equivalents de, la, que. In a topic analysis they dominate the top of the list and hide the interesting words, so the ignore option lets you see the content words instead.

Can I use it for SEO keyword density?

Yes. Paste your article, find your keyword in the table, and read its percentage — that is its density. There is no magic number, but a natural density usually sits around 0.5%–2%. If your keyword shows a very high percentage you are probably over-optimising, and it is worth mixing in synonyms.

Does it treat singular and plural, or accents, as the same word?

No. Each written form is counted as it appears: cat and cats are two different words, and so are resume and résumé. The tool does not do stemming or lemmatisation, so it will not merge word forms. Accents are preserved in the displayed word and only stripped when checking the stopword list.

Is my text private?

Completely. All counting happens in JavaScript inside your browser; the text is never sent to a server or stored. You can disconnect from the internet and the tool keeps working.