Word Frequency Counter
100% private — runs on your device, never uploaded. Works offline once loaded.
Paste any text to see each word ranked by how often it appears, along with the total and unique word counts. Ignore case and filter out common words to focus on what matters. Everything runs in your browser.
What the counter measures
Paste any block of text and the tool breaks it into words, tallies how many times each one appears, and ranks them from most to least frequent. Alongside the list you get two headline numbers: total words (every word counted, including repeats) and unique words (how many distinct words there are). The ratio between them is a rough measure of vocabulary richness — a low unique-to-total ratio means a lot of repetition.
Each entry in the ranked list also shows a small bar scaled to the most frequent word, so you can see at a glance which terms dominate the text.
How words are detected
Splitting text into words sounds simple but hides decisions. This tool treats any run of letters or digits as a word and uses those boundaries to break the text, which means punctuation, line breaks and symbols are discarded rather than counted. Apostrophes inside a word are preserved, so don't and it's stay intact instead of splitting into fragments.
The ignore case option (on by default) merges The, the and THE into a single tally — usually what you want. Turn it off when capitalisation is meaningful, for example to count how often a proper noun appears versus the same word used generically.
Why stop-word filtering helps
In natural language, a handful of function words — articles, prepositions and pronouns like the, of, and, to, a — always top the frequency chart regardless of the subject. They tell you nothing about what a text is about. Enabling ignore common words removes a built-in list of these so the ranking surfaces the content-bearing terms instead. This is the same idea behind keyword-density and SEO analysis, where the goal is to see which topical words you actually lean on.
- Leave stop-words in when you want a true total or are studying writing style.
- Filter them out for keyword research, topic analysis, or summarising themes.
- Combine both toggles to compare how much of your text is filler versus substance.
Practical uses
Writers use frequency counts to catch crutch words they overuse; students and editors check that a piece isn't leaning too hard on one term. For SEO and content work, the ranked list doubles as a quick keyword-density readout, showing whether your target phrase appears often enough — or too often. Because you can copy the whole ranking as CSV, it drops straight into a spreadsheet for charting or deeper analysis, and since the processing is entirely local you can safely run it over private drafts, transcripts or notes.
Frequently asked questions
Does it count numbers as words?
Yes. Any run of digits (like a year or a quantity) is treated as a word, since it's a meaningful token. If you only want alphabetic words, remove numbers from your text first.
How are ties in frequency ordered?
Words that appear the same number of times are listed alphabetically, so the ranking is stable and predictable rather than random.
Why is the total different when I filter common words?
The total reflects the words actually being counted. When common words are excluded they no longer contribute to the total or the unique count, so both numbers drop.
Is there a limit on text size?
There's no fixed cap, but the on-screen list shows the top 500 words for performance. The copied CSV includes every word, and the totals always reflect the full text.
Does capitalisation affect the CSV export?
The export mirrors your current settings — if 'ignore case' is on, words are lower-cased and merged in the CSV exactly as shown in the list.
Can I use this for languages other than English?
Word splitting works for any language whose words are made of letters, including accented and non-Latin scripts. The common-word filter, however, only contains English stop-words, so leave it off for other languages.
Advertisement