Word Frequency Counter
Count how often each word appears, with keyword density percentages and the most common two and three word phrases.
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Total words
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Counted words
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Unique words
How to use this tool
- Paste or type text into the box.
- Turn on 'Exclude stop words' to ignore common words like 'the' and 'and', which otherwise dominate the count.
- Set a minimum word length to ignore very short words if you want.
- Check the word list for keyword density, and the phrase lists for the most repeated two and three word combinations.
About this tool
Two different audiences ask this same question for different reasons, so this tool serves both. Someone checking keyword density wants the percentage share each word takes up, to see whether a target phrase is over or under used. Someone editing their own writing wants to catch words they lean on without noticing, "very", "just", "really", repeated past the point of being useful. Word counts alone favour whichever word is longest in the list, so every count here also shows its share of the total as a percentage, which is the number that actually answers "is this overused". Common stop words ("the", "and", "of", "to") can be excluded with a toggle, since they otherwise fill the entire top of any list and hide everything more useful underneath. Beyond single words, the tool also counts the most repeated two-word and three-word phrases (bigrams and trigrams), which single-word counts miss entirely: "customer service" and "content marketing" are phrases, not words, and only show up if adjacent word pairs are counted together. Counting happens as you type, entirely in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded, which matters for unpublished writing, internal documents, or anything under NDA.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a word here?
A sequence of letters, optionally containing an apostrophe or hyphen, so "don't" and "well-known" each count as one word. Numbers and punctuation on their own are not counted as words.
What does keyword density mean, and how is it calculated?
It's the percentage of the total word count that one word or phrase makes up. A word appearing 12 times in a 400-word count has a density of 3%. This is the figure that actually tells you whether a term is over-used or under-used, since a raw count of 12 means something different in a 100-word page than in a 10,000-word one.
What are stop words, and why exclude them?
Stop words are extremely common words, "the", "and", "of", "to", "is", that carry little topical meaning on their own. Left in, they fill the entire top of a frequency list in almost any English text, since they are common in every kind of writing regardless of subject. Excluding them surfaces the words that actually distinguish this text from any other.
What are the two and three word phrase lists for?
They count adjacent word pairs (bigrams) and triples (trigrams), which a single-word count cannot see: a phrase like "customer service" or "climate change" is two separate words individually, but the phrase itself may be far more meaningfully repeated than either word alone. This is useful for both SEO keyword phrase research and spotting repeated phrasing in your own writing.
Does a minimum word length setting help?
It filters out very short words (like "a", "I", "of") without needing the stop word list, useful if you want a quicker cut that doesn't depend on a fixed list of excluded words.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. Counting happens entirely in your browser as you type. Nothing is transmitted, logged or stored, so it's safe for unpublished writing, internal documents or anything confidential.