Word frequency counter
Exact counts for every word and phrase in your text — the numbers behind a word cloud. Export to CSV or send the list straight to the cloud generator.
What a frequency analysis tells you
Word frequency analysis is the simplest form of text analysis: count each word, sort by count, look at the top. Linguists use it to compare authors, teachers to spot overused words in essays, researchers to get a first read of interview transcripts, and SEO writers to check they aren't repeating a keyword unnaturally.
The most frequent words in any English text are always function words — “the”, “of”, “and”, “to”. That pattern is so regular it has a name, Zipf's law: the second most common word appears about half as often as the first, the third about a third as often, and so on. That's why the counter skips common words by default: the interesting words sit just below them.
Reading the numbers
- Count — how many times the word or phrase appears.
- % of words — count ÷ total words, i.e. density. A content word above 2–3% in a long text is usually worth a second look.
- Lexical variety — unique words ÷ total words. Short texts score high; don't compare a tweet with a thesis.
- Reading time — words ÷ 238 per minute, the average silent reading speed for adult non-fiction found in Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis.
When you want a picture instead of a table, press Make a cloud: the counts become a weighted list in the word cloud generator, where the sizes match these numbers exactly.
Questions people ask
How does the word frequency counter count words?
It splits your text into words made of letters and numbers, keeping apostrophes and hyphens inside words (“don’t”, “well-known”). Counting ignores capital letters. With “Skip common words” on, words like “the”, “is” and “of” are left out of the table but still count towards the total.
What is lexical variety?
The share of words that are unique (unique words ÷ total words), also called the type–token ratio. Higher means more varied vocabulary. It naturally falls as texts get longer, so only compare texts of similar length.
What are 2-word and 3-word phrases?
Also called bigrams and trigrams: word pairs and triples that appear next to each other, like “climate change” or “at the end”. With common words skipped, phrases that start or end with a common word are ignored, which leaves the meaningful ones.
Can I use this for SEO keyword density?
Yes — the percentage column is keyword density (occurrences ÷ total words). Search engines don’t reward a target density, so use it to spot accidental repetition rather than to hit a number.
Is my text private?
Yes. Counting happens entirely in your browser; the text is only kept in this browser’s local storage so it is still there next time.