Word Frequency Counter
Paste text to see how often each word appears, ranked with counts and shares.
| # | Word | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | the | 6 | 13.0% |
| 2 | a | 4 | 8.7% |
| 3 | more | 4 | 8.7% |
| 4 | you | 4 | 8.7% |
| 5 | mind | 3 | 6.5% |
| 6 | be | 2 | 4.3% |
| 7 | fire | 2 | 4.3% |
| 8 | think | 2 | 4.3% |
| 9 | to | 2 | 4.3% |
| 10 | alive | 1 | 2.2% |
| 11 | and | 1 | 2.2% |
| 12 | asks | 1 | 2.2% |
| 13 | but | 1 | 2.2% |
| 14 | curious | 1 | 2.2% |
| 15 | filled | 1 | 2.2% |
| 16 | is | 1 | 2.2% |
| 17 | keeps | 1 | 2.2% |
| 18 | kindled | 1 | 2.2% |
| 19 | learning | 1 | 2.2% |
| 20 | not | 1 | 2.2% |
| 21 | of | 1 | 2.2% |
| 22 | questioning | 1 | 2.2% |
| 23 | questions | 1 | 2.2% |
| 24 | read | 1 | 2.2% |
| 25 | vessel | 1 | 2.2% |
Share is each word’s count ÷ total words. Counting is case-insensitive and ignores punctuation.
A word frequency counter ranks the words in your text by how often each one appears. It lowercases everything, strips punctuation, then tallies each word — reporting total words, unique words, and each word’s share. An optional toggle hides common stop words like “the”, “a”, and “and” so only meaningful terms remain.
What it counts
The counter splits your text into words, folds them to lowercase so The and the count together, and removes surrounding punctuation so cat. and cat match. It then builds a frequency table: each distinct word and how many times it occurs. Total words is every token; unique words is the number of distinct entries shown. Each row’s share is that word’s count divided by the total. Toggle “Ignore common words” to drop function words and surface the terms that carry meaning.
How the counting works
There is no formula — just a deterministic procedure. The text is lowercased, matched into word tokens (letters and digits, keeping internal apostrophes so don’t stays one word), and each token increments a tally. The tallies are sorted by count, highest first, with ties broken alphabetically, and the top results are listed.
- 1 Lowercase the text. So “The”, “the”, and “THE” are treated as the same word — counting is case-insensitive.
- 2 Split into words and strip punctuation. In “The cat sat on the mat. The cat ran.” you get the tokens: the, cat, sat, on, the, mat, the, cat, ran — 9 words total.
- 3 Tally each word. Counting gives the = 3, cat = 2, and sat, on, mat, ran = 1 each — 6 unique words.
- 4 Rank by count. Sort highest first: the (3), cat (2), then the single-use words. “the” is 3 ÷ 9 = 33.3% of the text.
- 5 Optionally hide common words. Turn on “Ignore common words” and “the” and “on” drop out, leaving cat (2), sat, mat, ran — the content words.
How words are handled
The rules the counter applies before tallying.
| Rule | Example | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Case is ignored | “Run” and “run” | Counted as one word: run |
| Punctuation is stripped | “mat.” and “mat” | Counted as one word: mat |
| Internal apostrophe kept | “don’t” | Stays one word: don’t |
| Hyphen splits tokens | “well-known” | Two words: well, known |
| Stop words (toggle on) | “the”, “a”, “and”, “of” | Excluded from the ranking |
| Numbers count | “2024” | Counted as a word |
Reading the results
Keyword density. A word’s share is a quick density check — if one term dominates, the text may be repetitive or over-optimised. Writing analysis. Hiding stop words reveals the topics a draft actually dwells on, which is useful for spotting whether your essay stays on its thesis. Avoiding repetition. If a content word ranks far higher than you expected, that is your cue to vary the vocabulary. Note that the counter treats run, runs, and running as separate words, since it does not stem or lemmatise — count them together yourself when judging overuse.