Find the words and phrases you use most
The Word Frequency Counter lists every word in your text with how many times it appears and what share of the text it makes up. Switch to 2-word or 3-word phrases to find repeated expressions such as “solar panels” or “at the end of the day”, which a single-word count cannot show.
Writers use it to catch overused words before submitting an essay or article. SEO and content teams use it to check which topics a page really focuses on. Students, researchers and teachers use it for quick text analysis of speeches, survey answers, customer reviews or interview transcripts. The analysis happens in your browser, so even confidential documents stay on your device.
How to use the Word Frequency Counter
- Paste or type your text into the box. The table updates as you type.
- Choose what to count: single “Words”, “2-word phrases” or “3-word phrases”.
- Keep “Exclude common English stop words” ticked to hide filler such as “the”, “and” and “of”, set a minimum word length, and decide whether to ignore case and numbers.
- Pick how many rows to show, sort by clicking the Word, Count or % column headings, or type into “Look up a word” to find one term.
- Press “Download CSV” to open the full list in Excel or Google Sheets, or “Copy table” to paste it anywhere.
Word Frequency Counter features
Words and n-grams
Count single words, two-word phrases (bigrams) or three-word phrases (trigrams). Phrases never run across sentence or clause breaks, so the results are real expressions.
Stop-word filter
A list of almost 200 common English function words and contractions can be excluded so the meaningful vocabulary rises to the top.
Sortable table with bars
Sort by frequency or alphabetically and see each word’s count, percentage and a bar showing how it compares with the most frequent term.
Text statistics
Total words, unique words, the number of stop words skipped and lexical diversity are shown above the table.
CSV export
Download every row as a UTF-8 CSV file that opens correctly in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers, including accented letters.
How the counting works
A word is a run of letters or digits; apostrophes and hyphens inside a word keep it together, so “don’t”, “roof’s” and “fastest-growing” each count once. With “Ignore case” on, “Solar” and “solar” are merged. The percentage for single words is the count divided by the total number of words in the whole text — the same figure SEO tools call keyword density.
For phrases, the text is first split at full stops, question marks, colons, semicolons, brackets, line breaks and “comma + space”, and every run of two or three consecutive words inside each piece is counted. With stop words excluded, a phrase is skipped if it starts or ends with a stop word, which removes fragments like “of the” but keeps phrases such as “cost of living”. Phrase percentages are the share of all phrases of that length.
Lexical diversity explained
Lexical diversity (the type–token ratio) is the number of different words divided by the total number of words. A short note might score 70% or more, while a long report naturally falls lower because common words repeat. Compare it only between texts of similar length: it is useful for spotting a draft that keeps reaching for the same few words.
Ways to use word frequency
- Editing: if a word like “really”, “very” or “just” sits near the top of the list, replace some uses or cut them. Check overall flow afterwards with the Readability Checker.
- SEO: confirm that your main topic and its related phrases appear naturally, and that no keyword is stuffed. The Keyword Density Checker focuses on that job.
- Feedback analysis: paste survey answers or app reviews and switch to 2-word phrases to surface recurring themes like “customer service” or “battery life”.
- Language learning: frequency lists from a text you are reading show which vocabulary is worth learning first.
- For overall length, sentences and reading time, use the Word Counter.
Word Frequency Counter FAQ
How do I count how many times a word appears in a text?
Paste the text into the word frequency counter and type the word into “Look up a word”. The table shows its exact count and percentage. Untick “Exclude common English stop words” first if you are looking for a word like “the” or “and”.
What are stop words?
Stop words are very common function words — articles, pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary verbs and contractions such as “the”, “is”, “of”, “they” and “don’t”. They make up a large share of any English text but say little about its topic, so they are hidden by default.
What are n-grams?
An n-gram is a sequence of n consecutive words. Two-word sequences are called bigrams and three-word sequences trigrams. Counting them reveals repeated phrases and collocations that single-word counts miss.
Does it work with other languages?
Counting works with any language that separates words with spaces, including Spanish, French, German, Hindi and Russian, because letters from every Unicode script are recognised. The built-in stop-word list is English only, so untick it for other languages.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. The word frequency counter runs entirely in your browser, and the CSV file is created on your device. Nothing is sent to a server or stored.
Why is the percentage different from other tools?
Tools divide by different totals. Here a single word’s percentage is its count divided by all words in the text, including stop words, and a phrase’s percentage is its count divided by all phrases of the same length.