How Word Frequency Counter Works
The tool lowercases your text and splits it into tokens wherever it finds anything other than a letter, digit or apostrophe — so punctuation and line breaks act as word boundaries. It then tallies how many times each unique word appears, sorts the results from most to least frequent, and displays the top 20 words along with their counts.
How to Use This Tool
- Paste your text into the box.
- Select Analyze to tally the words.
- Review the ranked list of the top 20 most frequent words and their counts.
- Select Reset to analyze a different passage.
Example
The text "the cat sat on the mat, the cat was happy" ranks as: the — 3, cat — 2, then sat, on, mat, was, happy each appearing once.
Helpful Tips
- This tool doesn't filter out common words like "the" or "and" — for a clearer picture of topic-specific language, scan past the top few entries.
- Apostrophes inside words, like in "don't" or "it's", are kept as part of the word rather than splitting it in two.
- Running your own writing through this tool can reveal overused words worth varying in an edit pass.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the count case-sensitive?
No, all text is lowercased before counting, so "Cat" and "cat" are combined into a single entry.
Does it filter out common words like "the" or "a"?
No, every word is counted equally — the tool doesn't apply a stop-word list, so very common words often appear at the top.
How many words are shown in the results?
The top 20 most frequent words are displayed, ranked from highest to lowest count.
Are numbers counted as words?
Yes, standalone numbers are tokenized and counted the same way as words.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your input is not uploaded to any server.