Word Frequency Counter

How to use the word frequency counter

1. Paste or type your text into the box, or press Open file to load a plain-text file. Example fills in a short sample.
2. Choose what to Count: Single words, Two-word phrases or Three-word phrases.
3. Tick Skip common words (the, and, of…) if you only want content words, and raise Minimum count to hide words that appear only once or twice.
4. Read the ranked table: rank, word or phrase, count and share of words. The line under the editor gives the totals, for example “29 words, 13 different words listed”.
5. Pick a Text result format and press Copy or Download .txt to take the full list into a spreadsheet or another program.

The table shows the top 100 rows; the text result under it always holds the complete list. Rows are sorted by count, highest first, and rows with the same count are sorted alphabetically.

The options

The common-word list has 184 English function words: articles (a, an, the), pronouns (I, you, it, us), prepositions (of, in, under), conjunctions, forms of be, have and do, their contractions (don’t, it’s) and a few others such as also, may, just and very. Nouns, verbs such as said, and numbers are never skipped.

How words are matched

The tool splits the text at spaces, tabs and line breaks, keeps the pieces that contain a letter or digit (the same rule as the word counter), then lowercases each word and trims punctuation from its start and end. Punctuation inside a word stays. These results come from the tool itself:

Email addresses and links stay whole, so [email protected] is one row. If you want e-mail and email counted together, standardize the spelling with find and replace before you paste.

Worked example: the sample text

The Example button loads this text of 29 words:

The cat sat on the mat. The cat saw a dog. The dog saw the cat, and the cat ran up the tree; the dog sat under the tree.

With Two-word phrases the top rows are the cat (4), the dog (2) and the tree (2). With Skip common words ticked as well, only five phrases remain, each found once: cat ran, cat sat, cat saw, dog sat and dog saw. The text result for single words with Minimum count 3 in word: count format is:

the: 9
cat: 4
dog: 3

Phrases and the share of words

For phrases, the share is the number of words the phrase covers: count × phrase length ÷ total words. The cat appears 4 times in 29 words, so it takes up 8 words, or 27.59%. This is the usual way keyword density is calculated for phrases; the keyword density guide explains what the figure does and does not tell you about SEO.

Phrases are built from runs of consecutive words that do not cross punctuation: a phrase never runs past a word ending in . ! ? … ; : or a comma (or the Chinese and Japanese 。！？、), even when a closing quote or bracket follows. In the sample, mat the and dog the are therefore not listed, and Our new app is free. Try our new app today! gives new app and our new twice each but no free try. Line breaks on their own do not end a phrase, so line one and line two on separate lines also produce one line. The period after an abbreviation does not end a phrase: words with an inner period (U.S., e.g.) and short forms such as Mr., Mrs., Dr., Prof., St., vs., Inc. and Ltd. run on, so the U.S. market and the U.S. market lists u.s market twice and Mr. Smith gives mr smith. etc. runs on only when the next word starts with a lowercase letter (etc. and). Because overlapping phrases share words, the shares in a phrase list can add up to more than 100%, and a Minimum count of 2 leaves only the phrases you actually repeat.

When a word frequency list helps

• Editing. Spot words you lean on: really, just or a pet adjective that shows up 15 times in a 2,000-word draft. Tick Skip common words so they are not buried under the and and.
• SEO and content briefs. Check which terms and two- or three-word phrases a page actually repeats, and compare your page with a competitor’s text pasted in a second run.
• Survey and review answers. Paste open-ended responses exported from a form or CRM to see which words customers use most, then export the list as CSV for a chart.
• Language learning and vocabulary lists. Rank the words of a chapter or transcript to find the ones worth learning first.
• Coding and data work. Get a quick baseline before writing your own script. In Python, Counter(re.findall(r'\w+', text.lower())).most_common(10) gives a similar list, but \w+ splits don’t into don and t and well-known into two words, and most_common orders ties by first appearance rather than alphabetically.

To study individual characters instead of words, use the letter frequency counter. For an overview of the other counting tools, see the text analysis guide.

Questions