Word Frequency Counter

What is a word frequency counter?

A word frequency counter is a tool that reads a block of text, counts how many times each distinct word appears, and ranks those words from most to least frequent. You paste or type your text and instantly see which words dominate, plus the total word count and the number of unique words.

This tool shows the top 25 most-frequent words. It can ignore case so that The and the are treated as one word, and it reports two summary numbers: how many words there are in total (counting repeats) and how many of them are distinct. Everything runs in your browser, so your text stays private.

How does it work?

The method is straightforward: count of each distinct word, ranked by frequency. The tool performs three steps.

• Tokenise. It splits the text into words, where a word is any run of letters, numbers and apostrophes. Spaces, line breaks and punctuation such as commas and periods act as separators. Because apostrophes are kept, contractions like don't and possessives like dog's stay as single words.
• Count. It tallies how many times each distinct word appears. If ignore case is on, Fox, fox and FOX all fold into one entry; if it is off, they are counted separately.
• Rank. It sorts the words from most frequent to least frequent and displays the top 25.

Two totals describe the whole text. Total words is every word counted, including repeats. Unique words is the count of distinct words. So a word repeated five times adds 5 to the total but only 1 to the unique count.

Examples

The best way to trust a counter is to feed it text you can verify by hand.

Example 1 — the verified case. Enter:

the quick brown fox the lazy dog the fox

The ranked counts are:

• the — 3
• fox — 2
• quick — 1
• brown — 1
• lazy — 1
• dog — 1

Total words: 9. Unique words: 6. Add the counts (3 plus 2 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1) and you get 9, matching the total; the six distinct entries give the unique count.

Example 2 — ignore case in action. Enter:

Dog dog DOG cat

With ignore case on, the three forms of dog merge: dog — 3, cat — 1. Total words: 4. Unique words: 2. With ignore case off, Dog, dog and DOG are separate, giving four distinct entries and 4 unique words for the same 4 total words.

Example 3 — apostrophes stay whole. Enter:

don't stop don't

don't is one word because apostrophes are part of a word. The result is don't — 2, stop — 1. Total words: 3. Unique words: 2.

Reference: how the totals relate

This table shows how the same eight-word sentence breaks down. Take red blue red green red blue red blue:

Word	Count	Rank
red	4	1
blue	3	2
green	1	3

Here the total word count is 8 (4 plus 3 plus 1) and there are 3 unique words. Notice that total words always equals the sum of every count, while unique words equals the number of rows in the full ranked list.

What is a word frequency counter used for?

Counting word occurrences turns a wall of text into a quick picture of what it is actually about. Common uses include:

• SEO and keyword density — see how often a target term appears so you can judge whether content is under- or over-optimised. Divide a word’s count by the total words to get its density as a fraction.
• Editing for repetition — spot crutch words and filler that you lean on too often, then vary your wording.
• Content analysis and research — surface the dominant themes in reviews, survey responses, transcripts or notes at a glance.
• Study and language learning — find the highest-frequency vocabulary in a passage to prioritise what to learn first.
• Writing checks — confirm a brand name, call to action or required phrase actually appears the expected number of times.

Tips and common mistakes

Turn ignore case on when you care about a word regardless of capitalisation, which is the usual choice for keyword and theme analysis. Leave it off only when capitalisation is meaningful, such as distinguishing the brand Apple from the fruit apple.

Remember that the ranked list shows the top 25 words, so very long documents will have more unique words than appear on screen. The total and unique counts, however, always reflect the entire text.

A frequent surprise is how high function words rank. Articles and connectors like the, and, of and to almost always top the list, as the did in Example 1. They are not errors; they are simply the most common words in English. If you only want meaningful terms, scan past them to the first content word.

Another point: hyphens split words. state-of-the-art is counted as the four words state, of, the and art because a hyphen is not a letter, number or apostrophe. Numbers are kept, so 2024 counts as one word.

Limitations and notes

This is a raw frequency counter, not a grammar or meaning analyser. It does not group plurals or tenses together: run, runs and running are three different words, and dog and dogs are counted separately. It has no built-in list of stop words, so common function words appear in the ranking unless you ignore them yourself. Apostrophe handling is purely character-based, so a stray apostrophe attaches to whatever word it touches.

The tool runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Nothing is uploaded, stored or logged, which makes it safe for drafts, confidential documents and unpublished work, and it keeps working offline once the page has loaded.

Related tools

Working with text? Pair this with the word counter for totals like characters, sentences and reading time, the case converter to normalise capitalisation before counting, or the text repeater to generate repeated text. You can also explore the full text tools category.