Word Frequency Counter

Find the most frequently used words in a text.

Word Frequency Counter completes this text task in seconds, without the manual back-and-forth. With Word Frequency Counter, this kind of text edit becomes as simple as copy and paste. Everything runs in your browser — your file or text is never uploaded to a server.

Step-by-step

Paste the text into the 'Text' box. If you're analyzing a web page, copy only the main content, not the menu and footer.
Set 'Number of words to show'. Ten is enough for a quick look; 30 or 50 gives you more to work with.
Click 'Run'.
Read the list from the top and note which words show up more, or less, than you expected.

Example

You've finished a chapter of your thesis and your supervisor says you repeat yourself. Paste the chapter in, look at the top 20, and you may find words like significant, furthermore or in this context near the top. Search for them in the document and replace or cut some of them; the text reads more smoothly almost straight away.

The same check is useful for SEO. If the phrase a product page is meant to rank for doesn't appear in the list at all, the page may not be clear about its topic. If one word dominates everything else, the copy probably reads as forced.

What is word frequency analysis for?

Editing: Find repeated words in a thesis, article or blog and relax your style.
SEO: See whether the key phrases that reflect a page's main topic appear in the text.
Content analysis: Quickly see which concepts a text focuses on.
Language learning: Learn the most frequent words of a text first.

Reading the result

Function words such as “the”, “and” and “of” can fill the top of the list; the real information is in the words beneath.
In inflected languages like Turkish, “kitap”, “kitabı” and “kitaplar” count as separate words; add the forms together for a root's total frequency.
However the tool treats upper and lower case, also check different spellings of important words.
There is no ideal “keyword density” percentage for search engines; write naturally for the reader first.

Pasting your text processes it in the browser; nothing is sent to a server.

Things to keep in mind

Function words such as the, and, of and to can fill the top of the list. Skip past them to the content words underneath.
Different forms of the same word, like plan, plans and planning, may be counted separately. Add them up in your head to see how often a concept really appears.
A high count doesn't by itself make a page rank. Search engines care about whether the text actually helps the reader.
When comparing texts of different lengths, think in terms of share of the text rather than raw counts.