Word frequency: which words a text leans on
A word frequency count lists every distinct word in a text with the number of times it appears, most frequent first. Writers use it to spot words they overuse, SEO editors to check which terms a page actually emphasises, students to study vocabulary, and researchers as the first step of text analysis.
Paste any text and this tool shows the total number of words, the number of distinct words and a ranked table. You can hide common stopwords such as the and and, and ignore very short words.
How to use it
- Paste or type your text.
- Keep Filter stopwords on to hide common function words, or switch it off to count everything.
- Set the minimum word length to skip short words.
- Read the ranked table from the top; the first rows are the words your text uses most.
Example: a short sentence, stopwords filtered
The cat sat on the mat. The cat was happy.
Total words: 10 Unique words: 4 cat 2 happy 1 mat 1 sat 1
The, on and was are stopwords, so they are left out of the table but still count towards the total of 10 words.
Reading the results
In almost any text a few words make up a large share of the total, while most words appear once or twice. That pattern is known as Zipf's law, and it means the top of the table tells you a lot. If a word you did not intend to stress shows up near the top, consider synonyms or rephrasing.
The ratio of unique words to total words is a rough measure of vocabulary variety. It falls naturally as texts get longer, so compare texts of similar length.
What counts as a word
Words are runs of letters and digits from any alphabet; apostrophes and hyphens stay inside them, so don't and well-known each count once. Everything is lower-cased first, so The and the are the same word. The counter does not reduce words to a stem, so cat and cats are listed separately.
Using it for SEO
A frequency table shows whether the topic of a page is actually present in the text. It is not a target to hit: search engines stopped rewarding keyword density long ago and treat repetition as a spam signal. Use the table to make sure the main subject and its related terms appear naturally, and to catch accidental repetition.
Questions
Which stopwords are filtered?
A built-in list of common English function words such as the, a, and, of, to and is. The filter does not cover other languages.
Does it work for languages other than English?
Yes, words in any alphabet are counted. Languages written without spaces, such as Chinese or Japanese, are counted by space-separated chunks, which is not a real word count for them.
Is my text stored?
No. The analysis runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded.