Word Frequency Counter

The Word Frequency Counter reads a passage and lists its words from most to least used, with a count next to each one. Writers use it to catch repetition, SEO editors to see which terms a page actually leans on, and students to get a feel for the vocabulary of a speech, essay or transcript.

What happens to your text before it is counted

Paste the text into the Input box and press Analyze. Before counting, the tool normalises the text so that one word is not split into several entries:

• Everything is lowercased, so "Monsoon" at the start of a sentence and "monsoon" in the middle count as the same word.
• Punctuation is stripped, except straight apostrophes and hyphens. Contractions such as don't and compounds such as well-timed stay together as single words.
• Words are split on whitespace: spaces, tabs and line breaks all act as separators.
• Numbers count as words, so a year like 2024 that appears three times shows up as 2024: 3.

The result is a plain list in the form word: count, highest count first, capped at the 40 most frequent words. Words with equal counts keep the order in which they first appeared, except that pure numbers are placed ahead of words in a tie. The Copy result button copies the whole list for a spreadsheet or your notes.

Worked example: a short phone review

Take this 27-word review:

Battery life is great. The battery lasts two days, and the camera is great too. Camera quality in low light is average, but the battery charges fast.

The first lines of the output are:

battery: 3
is: 3
the: 3
great: 2
camera: 2
life: 1
lasts: 1

The remaining words follow at 1 each, 19 distinct words in all. "Battery" appears three times, which tells you what the reviewer cared about most, and the capitalised and lowercase forms were merged. To turn a count into a share of the text, divide by the total number of words: 3 ÷ 27 is about 11.1%. The keyword density checker does that percentage step for you, and the word counter gives the total.

Reading the list sensibly

Function words such as the, is, and, of and to top almost every English text, and this tool does not filter them out, so skim past them to the first content words. Also watch for variants that are counted separately: farmer, farmers and farmers' are three entries, as are run and running. Add them up yourself if you need a total for the root word.

Apostrophe style matters as well. A straight apostrophe is kept, but the curly one that Word and most phone keyboards insert is removed, so don’t becomes dont. If a document mixes both styles, the same word can show up twice.

Practical uses

• Self-editing: find crutch words like very, actually or basically in an essay, cover letter or statement of purpose.
• Web copy: confirm that a product page mentions its main term often enough without hammering it into every sentence.
• Feedback and transcripts: paste survey comments or meeting notes to see which topics people raise most.
• Comparing drafts: run two versions of a speech and check whether an overused word has been trimmed.

Limitations

The counter works on single words only, so a phrase like "credit card" is counted as two separate entries. It does not group word forms by their root, and it only shows the top 40, which hides the long tail of a big document. Letters outside the basic English alphabet are also stripped: Hindi, Tamil or other Indian-script text produces an empty list, and accented words lose their accented letters (café is counted as caf). Counting happens in your browser tab, and the text is not uploaded.