Word Frequency Counter

What is a word frequency counter?

A word frequency counter reads a block of text and tells you how often each word appears, ranked from most to least common. It's the quickest way to see what a piece of writing actually emphasises — the words you lean on, the terms that dominate, and how balanced (or repetitive) your vocabulary is. Paste an essay, an article, a transcript or a product description and the ranking builds itself as you go.

How it works

The tool does three things every time your text changes:

1. Tokenises the text — it converts everything to lowercase, removes punctuation, and splits on whitespace so "Design," and "design" count as the same word.
2. Counts each distinct word, keeping a running tally.
3. Ranks the results, showing the top words with a raw count and a percentage of the total, plus headline figures for total and unique words.

Because it runs live, you can watch the distribution shift as you edit — handy for spotting a word you've repeated three sentences in a row.

Stop words: signal versus noise

Left unfiltered, any English text is topped by function words: the, a, of, to, and, is. They're grammatically essential but they rarely tell you anything about the subject. The ignore common stop words toggle removes a built-in list of these so the ranking highlights the words that carry meaning — the nouns, verbs and terms your text is really about. Turn it off when you want a literal count of everything, including the small words.

How to use it

1. Type or paste your text into the box.
2. Read the total words and unique words counts at the top.
3. Scan the ranked table of the most-used words, each with its count and percentage share.
4. Toggle ignore common stop words on to focus on meaningful terms, or off for a raw count.
5. Hit Copy list to grab the ranking as clean text for a report, brief or spreadsheet.

A worked example

Imagine a short paragraph that repeats the word "browser" five times, "tool" four times and "privacy" twice, alongside a scattering of stop words. With stop words shown, the and your might top the list and bury the point. Flip the toggle on and the ranking becomes browser (5), tool (4), privacy (2) — instantly telling you the paragraph is about browser-based tools and privacy, which is probably what you wanted to confirm. If you also need overall length or reading time, the Word Counter covers that, and to tidy a list before analysing it the Remove Duplicate Lines and Text Sorter tools pair nicely.

Who it helps

• Writers and editors catching overused words and filler.
• SEO and content teams checking keyword density without a bloated app.
• Students and researchers summarising the vocabulary of a passage or transcript.
• Anyone curious about the shape of their own writing.

Private by design

The whole analysis runs in your browser with plain JavaScript — your text is never uploaded, stored or sent anywhere, and it disappears the moment you refresh the page. That means you can safely paste unpublished drafts, client work or sensitive notes. Explore more writing and text tools on the all tools page.