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Word Frequency Counter

Use this free word frequency counter to see which words you use most. Paste any text — an essay, a blog post, a speech, or a product description — and it counts every word, ranks them from most to least common, and shows the result as a table and a bar chart. You can ignore case, filter out common stopwords, and download the full frequency table as a CSV file.

How it works

A word frequency counter reads your text and tallies how many times each word appears. First it splits the text into words: a word is a run of letters or numbers, and punctuation, spaces, and line breaks mark the boundaries. A contraction such as don't counts as one word, because the apostrophe sits inside the word, and a number such as 2026 counts as a word too. A hyphenated word is split at the hyphen, so well-known counts as two words, well and known. This matches how most word processors and text tools split words, so the totals line up with the counts you see elsewhere.

Next, the counter groups identical words together. By default it is case-insensitive, so The at the start of a sentence and the in the middle of a sentence are added into a single row. That is almost always what you want, because a word at the start of a sentence is not a different word. If you turn the case-insensitive option off, capital and lowercase forms are counted separately, which helps when checking inconsistent capitalization.

Then it ranks the words. Each word's count is divided by the total number of words and multiplied by 100 to give its percentage share of the text. The table is sorted by count from highest to lowest, so the first row is always your most used word. When two words tie, they are listed in alphabetical order. The bar next to each row is scaled to the top word, so the longest bar always belongs to the most frequent word and the other bars show their counts in proportion.

Two filters change what shows up in the table without changing the headline totals. The stopwords filter removes very common words — the, and, is, of, to, a, in, that, it, was, for, on, are, as, with, at, be, this, have, from — so the words that carry real meaning rise to the top. In most English text, the is the most common word by a wide margin, and removing it is the fastest way to see what a passage is actually about. The minimum word length filter drops short words from the table, which is handy when you want to focus on longer, more specific words. Both filters affect only the frequency table and chart; the total word count, unique word count, and character counts always cover the whole text.

The other numbers in the result box are worked out at the same time. Characters are counted twice: once with spaces included, and once with spaces removed, so you can use whichever number a platform or assignment asks for. Sentences are counted by splitting at periods, exclamation points, and question marks, and a piece only counts if it holds at least one letter or number. Average word length is the total number of letters divided by the total number of words, and reading time is the word count divided by 200 words per minute, a typical adult reading speed for ordinary text. Everything runs in your browser as you type, so the table, the chart, and the totals update the moment you paste new text. Your text never leaves your device.

Worked example

Suppose you paste this short paragraph into the tool:

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The dog sleeps under the big oak tree while the fox runs through the green field. The field is green and the tree is big.”

Step 1: count the words. The first sentence has 9 words, the second has 16, and the third has 9, giving 34 words in total.

Step 2: count the unique words. Grouping identical words together, with case ignored, leaves 20 unique words: the, quick, brown, fox, jumps, over, lazy, dog, sleeps, under, big, oak, tree, while, runs, through, green, field, is, and.

Step 3: find the most frequent word. The appears 8 times — twice in the first sentence, four times in the second, and twice in the third — so it tops the table at 8 ÷ 34 × 100 = 23.5% of all words. Seven words appear twice each: fox, dog, big, tree, green, field, and is. The other twelve words appear once.

Step 4: check the remaining totals. The paragraph is 166 characters including spaces and 133 characters without spaces, with 3 sentences. The 34 words hold 130 letters, so the average word length is 130 ÷ 34 = 3.8 letters. At 200 words per minute, the reading time is less than 1 minute.

Step 5: try the stopwords filter. Turn on “Ignore common stopwords” and the table changes: the (8 times), is (2), and (1), over (1), under (1), and through (1) are removed, leaving 20 words in the table. The new top words are fox, dog, big, tree, green, and field, each appearing twice, or 5.9% of all words. The headline total stays at 34 words, because the filter only changes the table, not the count. Try the same text in the tool above — it is already loaded in the box — and you will see exactly these numbers.

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