Word Frequency Counter
Paste any text to see how often every word appears. The word frequency counter ranks your words from most to least used, shows each word’s count and density, and can skip common words like “the” and “and” so the words that matter stand out.
- Ranked word list
- Density for every word
- Stays on your device
Word frequency list
Every word with how often it appears, most used first. Density is the word’s share of all the words in your text, common words included.
| # | Word | Count | Density |
|---|
Your word list appears here, most used word first.
How to count word frequency
Finding the most frequent words in a text takes a few seconds with this word frequency counter.
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Paste your text
An article, an essay, a transcript or a page of your website. You can also open a .txt, .md, .csv or .html file. The list updates as you type.
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Choose what to count
Common words such as “the”, “of” and “and” are skipped by default. Turn that off to see every word, include numbers, match upper and lower case, or only list words of 3, 4, 5 or 7+ letters.
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Read, copy or download
Words are ranked by count, with each word’s density. Copy the list with its counts, or download it as a CSV file to open in Excel or Google Sheets.
In the sample paragraph, “coffee” appears 4 times in 62 words, a density of 6.45%. “Roast” comes next with 3, and “beans”, “fresh”, “cup” and “flavour” appear twice each.
What the word frequency list shows
The word frequency counter gives you the ranked list plus the numbers that describe it.
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#
Ranked list
Every different word with its count, most frequent first. Ties keep the order the words first appear.
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%
Density
Each word’s share of all the words in your text, so you can compare texts of any length.
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1×
Used once
How many words appear only once, and how many appear three times or more.
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CSV
Copy and export
Copy the list as word–count pairs, or download a spreadsheet file with rank, count and density.
How word frequency and density are calculated
The counter splits your text into words the same way the word counter does: runs of letters and numbers, with apostrophes and hyphens inside a word kept together, so don’t, well-known and 3.5 each count as one word. Curly and straight apostrophes are treated as the same, so don’t and don't are one entry.
Frequency is how many times a word appears. Density is that count divided by the total number of words, times 100:
- “coffee” used 4 times in a 62-word paragraph = 4 ÷ 62 × 100 = 6.45%.
- Density always uses the full word total, common words included, so skipping “the” or “and” in the list doesn’t change anyone else’s percentage.
With Match case off, Coffee and coffee are counted together. Turn it on to keep proper nouns like Apple (the company) apart from apple (the fruit).
The most common words in English
In almost any English text, a handful of short words make up a large share of the total. These are the ten most frequent words in Peter Norvig’s count of the Google Books corpus, about 744 billion words.
| Rank | Word | Share of all words |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | the | 7.14% |
| 2 | of | 4.16% |
| 3 | and | 3.04% |
| 4 | to | 2.60% |
| 5 | in | 2.27% |
| 6 | a | 2.06% |
| 7 | is | 1.13% |
| 8 | that | 1.08% |
| 9 | for | 0.88% |
| 10 | it | 0.77% |
These ten words alone make up about a quarter of written English, which is why the counter skips common words by default.
Zipf’s law: why a few words do most of the work
Word frequencies follow a pattern called Zipf’s law: the most common word appears about twice as often as the second most common, three times as often as the third, and so on. In the Brown Corpus, a million-word sample of American English, “the” alone is nearly 7% of all words and “of” is just over 3.5%.
You’ll see the same curve in your own word frequency list: a few words at the top with high counts, then a long tail of words used once or twice. If one of your content words (a noun, verb or adjective) sits near the top with the function words, it’s the real topic of your text, or a word you lean on too much.
Ways to use a word frequency counter
A word frequency list is useful any time you want to know what a text is really about, or which words you repeat.
| Who | What they look for |
|---|---|
| Writers and students | Overused words (“really”, “very”, “just”) and repeated nouns to vary before handing in an essay. |
| SEO and content writers | Whether a page’s main topic words appear naturally, and which words dominate a competitor’s page. |
| Teachers and language learners | Vocabulary lists from a reading text, sorted by how often each word comes up. |
| Researchers | Key terms in interviews, survey answers and transcripts, exported to a spreadsheet for coding. |
| Editors and translators | Terms that must be translated or spelled consistently throughout a document. |
| Speech writers | Words a speaker repeats so often that listeners will notice. |
Word frequency and keyword stuffing
A word frequency counter shows how often your keywords appear, but there’s no “right” keyword density. Google’s spam policies describe keyword stuffing as filling a page with keywords “in an attempt to manipulate rankings”, including “repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural”.
Use the list the other way round: write for the reader, then check that your topic words appear where they belong and that no single word is repeated so often it reads strangely. To check one or two specific keywords, use the Specific Word Counter; to find repeated multi-word phrases, use the Phrase Frequency Counter.
Word frequency counter FAQ
Does the word frequency counter count “the” and “and”?
Not by default. Common words like the, and, of and to are skipped so the meaningful words rise to the top. Untick “Skip common words” to count every word.
How is word density calculated?
Density is a word’s count divided by the total number of words, times 100. A word used 5 times in 250 words has a density of 2%.
Are “Run” and “run” counted as the same word?
Yes, unless you tick “Match case”. With Match case on, capitalised and lower-case forms are listed separately.
Does it group plurals and verb forms together?
No. “Book” and “books”, or “run” and “running”, are separate words. This keeps the counts exact; add the forms together yourself if you need a combined figure.
Can I count word frequency in a file?
Yes. Use Open file to load a .txt, .md, .csv, .srt or .html file from your device. For a PDF, copy the text from the PDF Word Counter and paste it here.
Is there a word limit?
No fixed limit. Long books work too; very large texts take a moment longer on slower phones.
Does it work in other languages?
Yes. Words in any language that uses spaces are counted. Each Chinese or Japanese character counts as one word, like the main word counter. The common-word list is English only.
Is my text sent anywhere?
No. The counting happens in your browser, and nothing you paste is uploaded or stored.
Sources and references
- English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited, Peter Norvig
- Zipf’s law, Wikipedia
- Spam policies for Google web search, Google Search Central
More text analysis tools
- N-grams Phrase Frequency Counter Find repeated 2- to 5-word phrases (n-grams) and how often each appears. Open tool
- Find Specific Word Counter Count how many times a word or phrase appears, with every match highlighted. Open tool
- Unique Unique Word Counter Count distinct words, list each one once and get the type–token ratio. Open tool
- Repeats Duplicate Word Finder Find doubled words like “the the” and words repeated too close together. Open tool