text tool
Word frequency counter
Paste any text and every word in it is ranked by how many times it appears, with the count and its share of all the words. The 15 most used words are drawn as bars, common words such as the and of can be hidden, and the full list downloads as a CSV.
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- Runs on your device, nothing is uploaded
- Free, no sign in
- No watermark, no file limit
How it works
- 1
Paste the text
Put it in the Your text box. The totals line and the ranking update as you type.
- 2
Choose what counts
Hide common words, merge capitals, include numbers, and set the shortest word to count, from 1 to 5 letters.
- 3
Read the chart and the table
The top 15 appear as bars. Below, every word is ranked; type in Find a word in the ranking to jump to one.
- 4
Download the CSV
Download the full list as CSV saves rank, word, count and share for every word, ready for a spreadsheet.
Counting words, not just words in total
A word count tells you how long a text is. A frequency count tells you what it is about, and what its writer leans on. Each word is counted every time it appears, then the list is sorted from most to least used. Share is the count divided by the total number of words, so the figures for a long report and a short survey can be compared. Tied words share a rank, so if two words both appear 12 times they are both listed as, say, rank 4, and the next word is rank 6. The totals line adds two numbers worth noticing: how many different words there are, and how many are used only once.
The stopword switch changes the story
With nothing hidden, the top of any English text is the same: the, and, to, of, a. That ranking is correct but tells you nothing, which is why common words are hidden by default. The list holds 125 everyday English words, mostly articles, pronouns, prepositions and forms of to be and to have. Untick the box to see them, which is useful when you want to know whether you start too many sentences with I or overuse but. The share is always calculated against every word in the text, so hiding stopwords removes rows without changing the other percentages.
Reading open answers from a survey
A frequency count is the quickest first pass over a pile of open answers. A form's response CSV has one column per question, so copy the column for an open question, paste it here, and the words people reach for rise to the top. In the example, great and practice lead the list, with examples, hands, time and trainer tied behind them, which already suggests what people valued and what they wanted more of. Read the answers behind a frequent word before drawing conclusions, since cold venue and not cold at all share the word cold.
Why a few words dominate any text
In natural language a handful of words make up a large share of every text, and most words appear once or twice. The pattern is described by Zipf's law: roughly, the second most common word appears half as often as the first, the third a third as often, and so on. That is why the bar chart drops off steeply after the first few words, and why the count of words used only once is usually large. A topic word that climbs into the top ten of a long text, past the stopwords, is a strong signal of what the text is really about.
Limits worth knowing
Words are split wherever there is a space or punctuation, so a hyphen splits a compound into two words and an email address into several. Word forms are not merged, so plurals and tenses get their own rows. Capitals are merged by default; untick Count Great and great as one word to keep names and sentence starts apart. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored, ever, so a refresh clears the text.
Limits
- Words are split on spaces and punctuation, so hyphenated terms split: hands-on counts once as hands and once as on.
- An apostrophe inside a word keeps it whole, so don't and it's are one word each, and curly and straight apostrophes count as the same.
- The table shows up to 200 rows at a time, filtered by the search box. The CSV holds every word.
- The common word list is English. Text in other languages keeps its own common words in the ranking.
What it does not do
- It does not merge word forms, so plan and plans are separate rows.
- It does not count phrases. For two and three word phrases with percentages, use the keyword density checker.
- It does not judge sentiment or meaning; it counts.
- It does not upload or store your text.
Questions people ask
How is a word frequency counter different from a word counter?
A word counter gives totals: words, characters, sentences and reading time for the whole text. A frequency counter breaks that total down by word, so you see that a 900 word report uses project 31 times and customer only twice. Use the word counter to check length against a limit, and this tool to check what the text actually talks about and which words it repeats.
Can I analyse survey responses with this?
Yes, as a first pass. Export the responses to CSV, copy the column for one open question, and paste it. The ranking shows the words people use most, and the share column shows how dominant each one is. It counts words, not opinions, so read a sample of the answers behind each frequent word before reporting what respondents meant.
Why does hands-on show up as two words?
Words are split at spaces and punctuation, and a hyphen is punctuation, so hands-on is counted as hands and as on. That keeps the rule simple and predictable, and it means the parts of a compound are still counted when people spell it differently, such as hands on or handson. If a hyphenated term matters, replace its hyphen with nothing first using find and replace.
What does words used only once tell me?
It shows how varied the vocabulary is. In a long text most different words appear only once, which is normal. In a short set of answers, a high share of one-off words means people described things in many different ways, so the top of the ranking is less representative. A low share means people converged on the same words, which makes the ranking more meaningful.
How do I make a word cloud from the results?
Download the full list as CSV, which holds rank, word, count and share for every word that passed the filters. Most word cloud makers accept a list of words with weights, so paste the word and count columns into one of them. Hiding common words first gives a far more useful cloud, since otherwise the and and fill the middle.
Collect the answers with a form
Take what you made here into forms.
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Written and checked by the OneCraft team. Last checked .