Word Frequency Counter

Which words appear most, and how often.

About Word Frequency Counter

A word frequency counter lists every distinct word in a text with how many times it appears, most frequent first, along with the total and unique word counts.

How to use

  1. Paste the text. Counts update as you type; the Words and Unique totals sit above the list.
  2. Tick Ignore case (on by default) to count "The" and "the" together, and Ignore common words to drop stop words such as "the", "and" and "is".
  3. Each row has a Copy button for the word. Copy on the panel copies the whole list as tab-separated text, and Download saves it as word-frequency.tsv.

How words are counted

  • A word is a run of letters, digits and underscores. Apostrophes and hyphens split words, so "don't" counts as "don" and "t".
  • Rows are sorted by count, highest first, then alphabetically for ties.
  • The stop-word list has 41 common English words (a, an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, from, has, he, in, is, it, its, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, was, were, will, with, you, your, i, we, they, not, no, so, if, then, than, there, their). It is English-only and cannot be edited.
  • Words is the total counted after any stop words are removed; Unique is the number of rows.

Example

This is fun, this is great
→ Words 6 · Unique 4
is     2
this   2
fun    1
great  1

Privacy

Runs in the browser. No request is made, and nothing is stored.

Frequently asked questions

What are stop words?
Very common function words such as "the", "and", "of" and "is" that carry little meaning on their own. Search engines and text analysis usually remove them so that the remaining counts reflect the actual subject matter.
How is word count different from unique word count?
Word count is the total number of words including repeats; unique count is how many different words there are. "The cat and the dog" has 5 words but 4 unique words. The ratio of the two is a rough measure of vocabulary richness.
Why does the counter split words at apostrophes?
It matches words with the regular expression \b\w+\b, which treats only letters, digits and underscores as word characters. A contraction like "it's" therefore appears as "it" and "s"; the same happens to hyphenated terms.