About the Word Frequency Counter
Word Frequency Counter shows which words you use most in a text. Paste an essay, article, speech, transcript or any other text, and the tool lists every word with how many times it appears and what share of the text it makes up, with a bar chart. You can ignore capital letters, skip very common words such as the and of, and set a minimum word length, so that the words that matter come to the top. Switch to two-word or three-word phrases to find repeated expressions, or to letters to see the letter frequency of the text, which is used in puzzles and simple ciphers. Show the top 10 to 500 results, copy them, or download the full list as a CSV file for a spreadsheet. Your text stays in your browser and is not sent anywhere.
Updated September 2026
How to use the Word Frequency Counter
- 1Paste or type your text into the box.
- 2Choose to count words, two-word phrases, three-word phrases or letters.
- 3Turn on Ignore capital letters, and Skip common words if you want to see only the meaningful words.
- 4Set the shortest word length and how many results to show.
- 5Copy the list or download it as a CSV file.
What word frequency can tell you
A count of the words in a text reveals its subject and style at a glance. The most frequent meaningful words usually name the topic, and the most frequent small words reveal habits, such as too many uses of very or just. Writers use frequency lists to find repeated words to vary, students to check the balance of an essay, and researchers to study interviews, speeches and reviews.
The same counts can be turned into a word cloud, where bigger words are more common, or into a chart for a report. The CSV download makes it easy to do that in a spreadsheet.
Settings that matter
- Skip common words: removes small function words like the, and, of, to, a and in so that topic words stand out.
- Shortest word: use 3 or 4 to hide short words such as it and be without a list of stop words.
- Ignore capitals: on by default, so The and the are one word.
- Two- and three-word phrases: show repeated wording, with common function words left in.
- Top N: shows the most common results; the CSV always contains the whole list.
Tips for better results
Use a text of at least a few hundred words, since short texts give noisy counts. Remove headers, page numbers and menus if you copied from a web page, or they will be counted as words. Different forms of a word, such as run, runs and running, are counted separately, because the tool does not reduce words to their stems.
If you want the total number of words, characters and sentences, Word Counter does that, and Character Counter shows the length of a text against limits. Sort Lines and Remove Duplicate Lines help with lists of words, and Case Converter changes capitalisation.
Privacy and limits
The counting is done in your browser, so your text is never uploaded, which makes it fine for drafts, interviews and private notes. Very long texts of several hundred thousand words work but may feel slower on a phone.
The common words list has about 80 short English words. For other languages, use the shortest word setting instead, which works with any alphabet.
Features
- Words, two- and three-word phrases, and letters
- Counts and percentages with bars
- Ignore capitals and skip common words
- Minimum word length filter
- Top 10 to 500 results
- Copy or download as CSV
- Works with accents and many alphabets, and runs in your browser
Frequently asked questions
How do I find the most used words in a text?
Paste the text into the tool and read the list from the top. Words are ranked by how often they occur. Turn on Skip common words to remove words such as the, and, of and to, which otherwise fill the top of almost every list.
What counts as a word?
A word is a run of letters or digits, which may contain an apostrophe or a hyphen in the middle, so don't and well-known each count as one word. Punctuation and spaces separate words. Text in other alphabets is handled too.
Does it treat Word and word as the same?
Yes, when Ignore capital letters is on, which is the default. Turn it off if you want to count capitalised and lowercase forms separately, for example to find how many sentences start with the same word.
What is the use of phrase frequency?
Repeated phrases can show habits in your writing, such as overusing in order to, and they are useful for finding key expressions in a transcript or a set of reviews. The tool lists two- and three-word phrases that appear at least twice.
What is letter frequency for?
It shows how often each letter appears. In English, e, t, a, o and i are the most common letters, and this pattern is used to break simple substitution ciphers, to design keyboards and to solve word puzzles. Enter a long sample for a reliable picture.
Can I use it for SEO?
Yes, as a first look. It shows which words dominate your page. For a percentage-based view of chosen keywords, Keyword Density Checker is designed for that. Use both to check that your main topic words appear naturally and not too often.