Word Frequency Counter
Analyze word frequency in any text — stop word filtering, bar chart visualization, CSV export
Paste any text and instantly see which words appear most often, how many unique words it contains, and a full frequency-sorted table. This is useful for SEO keyword density analysis, content writing, academic text analysis, and data exploration.
Everything runs in your browser — your text is never sent to a server.
What Is Word Frequency Analysis?
Word frequency analysis counts how many times each unique word appears in a piece of text. The result is a frequency distribution: a ranked list of words from most common to least common.
This has applications across many fields:
- SEO and content writing: Check keyword density to avoid over-optimization or under-emphasis.
- Academic text analysis: Identify dominant themes, terminology, and vocabulary in a document.
- Language learning: Discover the most common vocabulary in a text you want to understand.
- Corpus linguistics: Analyze the frequency of words across large text samples.
- Editorial quality control: Identify overused words in a draft.
How to Use This Tool
- Paste or type your text into the input box.
- Review the stats — total words, unique words, and the top word.
- Adjust options:
- Case-sensitive: OFF by default — “The” and “the” count as the same word. Enable to count them separately.
- Ignore stop words: Filters out common English words like “the”, “and”, “is”, “a” that rarely carry meaning. Useful when you care about content words only.
- Min word length: Filters out very short words. Set to 3 to exclude single-letter words and two-letter function words.
- See the bar chart for a visual breakdown of the top 10 words.
- Browse the full table — sorted by frequency, showing rank, word, count, and percentage.
- Export CSV to copy the full table in comma-separated format for use in a spreadsheet.
Stop Words
When the “Ignore stop words” option is enabled, the tool filters out 70+ common English function words:
a, an, the, and, or, but, is, are, was, were, be, been, have, has, had, do, does, did, will, would, could, should, this, that, these, those, it, its, I, you, he, she, we, they, me, him, her, us, them, my, your, his, our, their…
Stop words are extremely common but carry little meaning — filtering them reveals the content-bearing vocabulary of your text.
Use Cases
SEO Keyword Density
Keyword density is the percentage of times a target keyword appears relative to the total word count. For example, if “javascript” appears 5 times in a 200-word article, its density is 2.5%.
Generally, keyword density between 1% and 3% is considered natural. Higher than 4-5% may look like keyword stuffing to search engines.
Use this tool to:
- Paste your article text.
- Find your target keyword in the table.
- Check its percentage.
- Adjust your content accordingly.
Content Editing — Finding Overused Words
Paste a draft into the tool and enable “Ignore stop words”. Sort by frequency and look at the top 10-20 content words. If the same word appears much more often than expected, consider using synonyms for variety.
Academic Analysis
For analyzing a paper or book chapter, paste the text and filter stop words. The resulting frequency table shows the key concepts and terminology, which can help with:
- Abstracting the main topics
- Comparing vocabulary across multiple documents
- Preparing a glossary
Language Learning
Paste a text in a language you’re learning. The word frequency list tells you which words to prioritize learning first — high-frequency words give you maximum comprehension per word learned.
Understanding the Statistics
Total Words: All words matched in the text, including stop words and short words, before any filtering.
Unique Words: The number of distinct word forms after applying your current filter settings.
Top Word: The most frequently occurring word after filters are applied.
Percentage: Each word’s count divided by total words × 100. This is relative to all words, including filtered ones.
Exporting Results
Click Export CSV to copy a comma-separated table with columns: Word, Count, Percentage. Paste into Google Sheets or Excel to sort, filter, and analyze further.
Frequently Asked Questions
How are words defined?
Words are matched using a regex pattern that catches alphabetic sequences including accented characters and apostrophes. Numbers-only tokens and symbols are not counted as words. Hyphenated compounds (like “state-of-the-art”) are treated as separate words.
Does case-sensitive mode affect stop word filtering?
Yes. When case-sensitive mode is enabled, stop word filtering only removes exact lowercase matches. “The” (capital T) would not be filtered — only “the” would. For most use cases, keep case-sensitive OFF when also using stop word filtering.
Can this analyze non-English text?
The stop word list is English-only, so stop word filtering won’t work correctly for other languages. The word counting itself works for any language that uses Latin-script alphabetic characters.
Is there a text length limit?
There’s no enforced limit. Very long texts (100,000+ words) may take a moment to process. The tool handles typical article, chapter, or page lengths (500–10,000 words) instantly.
Related Tools
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- String Analyzer — detailed text analysis including keyword density
- Text Case Converter — convert case before analysis
- Text Diff Merger — compare two versions of a text