Word Frequency Counter
Count how often each word appears in text, sorted by frequency, with an optional stop-word filter.
How this tool works
Paste your text
Any plain text you want to analyze.
Toggle stop words on or off
Exclude common function words like "the" and "and" for a more meaningful table.
Read the frequency table
Every word, sorted from most to least frequent.
Check the summary stats
Total words analyzed, unique word count, and the single most-repeated word.
Quick facts
- Category
- Text Tools
- Best for
- Checking an essay or article for overused words, or a rough keyword-density pass before publishing
About this tool
Paste any text and see a frequency table of the words it contains, sorted from most to least common, along with the total word count, unique word count, and the single most-repeated word. This is a word-level counterpart to character-frequency-counter, not a duplicate of it - that tool counts individual letters and symbols, which is useful for cipher analysis or typography questions, while this one counts whole words, which is what actually reveals a text's recurring themes, verbal tics, or overused terms. A toggle can exclude common English stop words - "the," "a," "is," "and," and similar high-frequency function words that carry little topical meaning - which matters because raw word frequency in ordinary English prose is dominated by these words almost every time, burying the actually meaningful repeated words underneath them. With stop words filtered out, the remaining frequency table much more directly reflects what a piece of text is actually about. Useful for checking an essay or article for overused words, doing a rough keyword-density pass on content before publishing, or getting a quick sense of a text's recurring vocabulary. Runs entirely client-side.
Why use this tool
Distinct from character-frequency-counter
Counts whole words, not individual letters - reveals topical repetition, not just letter distribution.
Stop-word filtering
Strip out "the," "a," "is," and similar words that would otherwise dominate the results without adding insight.
Sorted and summarized
Results come pre-sorted by frequency, with total and unique word counts shown up front.
Case- and punctuation-insensitive counting
Words are matched regardless of capitalization or surrounding punctuation, so counts reflect real usage.
Frequently asked questions
character-frequency-counter counts individual letters and symbols - useful for things like analyzing letter distribution in a simple cipher or checking typography. This tool counts whole words instead, which is what actually shows you which topics, terms, or phrases a piece of text repeats - a fundamentally different level of analysis aimed at content and meaning rather than character-level composition.
Stop words are common function words - articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and pronouns like "the," "a," "and," "is," "in," "of" - that appear extremely frequently in ordinary English text but carry little topical meaning on their own. Because they're so common, they almost always dominate a raw word-frequency count; filtering them out surfaces the words that actually reflect what the text is about.
No - words are matched case-insensitively and stripped of surrounding punctuation before counting, so "Fox," "fox," and "fox." are all counted as the same word. This matches how word frequency is meant to be measured in practice, since capitalization at the start of a sentence or trailing punctuation shouldn't split what is meaningfully the same word into separate counts.
Explore more free tools
Formatters, converters, validators, and generators - all free and running entirely in your browser.
Browse more tools