What this tool does
A word frequency counter reads your text and lists every word with the number of times it appears, from the most common to the rarest. You can count single words, or pairs and groups of three words that appear next to each other. The table shows the count and the share of all counted words, and you can sort it, copy it as CSV or download it for a spreadsheet.
Who uses word frequency
- Writers and editors spot words they repeat without noticing. If "really" or "very" sits near the top, the draft needs a pass.
- Students check that an essay uses varied vocabulary and stays on topic, and see the key terms of a reading text at a glance.
- Marketers and SEO writers see which terms a page is really about and whether the main topic shows up as clearly as they think.
- Researchers and teachers get a quick first look at interviews, survey answers or a set of reviews before a deeper analysis.
Words, phrases and stop words
Words counts each word on its own. 2-word phrases and 3-word phrases count groups of words that stand next to each other, such as "customer service" or "at the end".
A phrase never crosses a sentence. A full stop, a question mark, an exclamation mark, a colon, a semicolon or a line break ends the phrase, so the last word of one sentence and the first word of the next are never paired.
In any English text the top of the list is full of small words: the, of, and, to, a, in. These are called stop words. They are needed for grammar but tell you almost nothing about the topic. Tick Skip English stop words to hide them. For phrases, a phrase that starts or ends with a stop word is skipped, while one with a stop word in the middle stays. So "point of view" is counted and "of the" is not. The stop word list is for English only.
Options
- Ignore case counts Word, word and WORD as the same word and shows it in lower case. Untick it to keep them apart.
- Ignore numbers leaves out years, prices and other numbers.
- Minimum word length skips short words, such as anything under 4 characters, which is a quick alternative to the stop word list. A phrase that contains a skipped word is not counted.
- Show top sets how many rows the table and the CSV contain, from 10 to 1,000.
How words are found
Words are found with Intl.Segmenter, the word rules built into your browser. It knows that "don't" and "it's" are one word, that punctuation is not part of a word, and how to split many languages, including ones with accents or non-Latin letters such as Urdu, Arabic and Hindi. Hyphenated words like "well-known" or "state-of-the-art" stay one word, and so do email addresses and web addresses such as www.example.com, so they are counted whole. Older browsers without Intl.Segmenter use a simpler rule that keeps letters, digits and apostrophes together.
The counts can differ slightly from other tools, because every tool decides a little differently what a word is. If you need the total number of words, the word counter is made for that, and this guide to reaching an essay word count without padding shows how to use the totals well.
Reading the percentages
The percent column shows each count as a share of all counted words or phrases, after your filters. With stop words skipped, the percentages are shares of the remaining words, so they add up to 100% across the whole list, not just the visible rows.
A word on keyword density
Keyword density, the share of a page taken by one keyword, was once treated as an SEO target. Today search engines understand topics and meaning, and there is no ideal percentage to aim for. Repeating a term to reach a number makes a page harder to read and can look like keyword stuffing. Use the table the other way round: to find words you overuse, and to check that the words a reader expects actually appear. If you are building a keyword list, the guide to cleaning a keyword list helps, and Remove Duplicate Lines clears repeated entries.
Copy and download
Copy CSV puts the visible rows on the clipboard with a header row: rank, word or phrase, count and percent. Download .csv saves the same rows as a file that opens in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers. Click a column header to sort the table by word, by count or back to rank before you copy. To compare words with characters, see when word count or character count matters and the character counter.
Privacy
Your text is counted in your browser, and long texts in a background worker on your device. Nothing is uploaded, saved or tracked, and there is no sign-up. Text is limited to 1,000,000 characters so the page stays fast. Like every page on this site, this one may show ads from third-party vendors once ads are switched on, and those vendors can use cookies. Read the privacy policy for details.