Word Frequency Counter - Find Repeated Words

Worked example first

Paste this: The cat sat on the mat. The dog sat too. The tool finds 10 words and 7 unique words. The top of the list reads: the, 3, 30.0 percent; sat, 2, 20.0 percent. Then cat, on, mat, dog, and too, each at 1, or 10.0 percent.

Two details are worth noticing. The capitalized The at the start of each sentence was merged with the lowercase the, because counting ignores case. And the periods after mat and too vanished, because punctuation at the edge of a word is not part of the word.

Now tick exclude stop words. The and on drop off the list, and what is left is mostly content: cat, sat, mat, dog. On a real article, this is the view that tells you what the piece is actually about.

How a word is defined

A word is a run of Unicode letters. Apostrophes and hyphens are kept when they sit inside a word, so don't, it's, and state-of-the-art each count as one word. Anything else, such as spaces, commas, periods, quotes, brackets, and emoji, separates words and is thrown away.

Because it matches Unicode letters, not only A to Z, accented words like café and naïve and text in other alphabets are counted properly instead of being chopped into fragments.

Everything is lowercased before counting. The only catch is that proper nouns merge with ordinary words: Apple the company and apple the fruit share one row. For most writing checks, that is the right trade.

Using it to tighten your writing

Every writer has crutch words. Common ones are just, really, very, actually, that, and so. Paste a draft, exclude stop words, and scan the top 20. If really shows up 14 times in a 1,500-word essay, you have found your first edit.

It also catches repetition that reads fine sentence by sentence but grates across a page. Using the same verb or adjective five times in 300 words is easy to miss while writing and obvious once you see the count.

Teachers and editors use the unique word count as a rough vocabulary check. Divide unique words by total words to get what linguists call the type-token ratio. Short texts naturally score higher, so compare texts of similar length.

SEO: frequency is not a ranking lever

Word frequency is useful for SEO as a sanity check, not a target. Google representatives have said for years that there is no ideal keyword density, and Google Search Central warns that keyword stuffing, meaning repeating words unnaturally, violates its spam policies.

Use the list to confirm your page actually talks about its topic. If you wrote a guide to sourdough starters and flour, water, and starter are nowhere near the top, the page may be drifting. If your target phrase is at 6 percent and every sentence repeats it, rewrite for readers. The keyword density checker on this site gives a phrase-level view if you need it.

Common mistakes

Reading raw counts with stop words on. In almost any English text, the, and, of, and to fill the top spots. That tells you nothing about your writing. Exclude them unless you are specifically studying function words.

Pasting in navigation, footers, and boilerplate. If you copy a whole web page, menu labels and cookie notices get counted too. Paste only the body text.

Comparing percentages between texts of very different length. A word used 5 times is 5 percent of a 100-word post but 0.5 percent of a 1,000-word article. Compare like with like.

Reading the three numbers

Each row gives a word, how many times it appears, and its share of the total. The percent is simple: count divided by total words, times 100. In the example above, the appears 3 times out of 10 words, so 30.0 percent. The list is sorted by count, highest first, so the words you lean on hardest sit at the top.

Above the list, total words is every word in the text and unique words is how many distinct ones there are. A big gap between the two is normal. Short common words repeat constantly, which is exactly why the stop word filter exists.