Word Frequency Analyzer
Ranks every word by raw occurrence count — the overused-word check keyword density can't do.
This tool counts how many times each distinct word appears in your text and ranks them from most to least frequent. It's a genuinely different question from /keyword-density-checker/, which reports one specific term as a percentage of the total word count — word frequency analysis surfaces every word, unprompted, so you can spot a word you didn't realize you'd leaned on twenty times without deciding in advance to check for it.
Editors call this kind of check a "crutch word" audit: writers develop unconscious verbal tics (a favorite adjective, a hedge word like "just" or "really", a particular transition phrase) that a frequency list makes immediately visible in a way a straight read-through often doesn't.
The ranked word list appears here once you add text.
How words are ranked
The text is lowercased and split into word tokens (stripping surrounding punctuation), then each unique token is tallied and sorted by count, highest first. Common function words — "the", "a", "is", "and", and similar — are shown by default rather than filtered out, because for some checks (like verifying natural-sounding prose rhythm) their frequency is itself informative; a toggle lets you exclude common stop words if you specifically want to surface content words instead.
Case is folded so "The", "the", and "THE" are counted as the same word — this matches how a reader experiences repetition (they don't perceive capitalization as making a repeated word feel less repetitive), though it's worth knowing this differs from an exact case-sensitive string match.
Contractions and hyphenated words are each treated as a single token (matching /word-counter/'s tokenization), so "well-known" is tallied as one distinct word, not two.
Who uses this
- Spotting an overused word or filler phrase before final edit that a normal read-through missed because the eye skims past familiar words.
- Checking keyword-rich content (product descriptions, SEO articles) for natural variety versus robotic repetition.
- Academic or technical writing checks where a specific term should appear a controlled number of times, not accidentally dozens.
Edge cases to know about
- Very short input (a single sentence or two) produces a frequency list where almost everything appears once, which isn't very actionable — this tool is most useful on text of at least a few hundred words where genuine patterns can emerge.
- Numbers are tokenized and counted like words by default, so a data-heavy passage full of numerals will show numeric tokens in the frequency list alongside real words.
- Words that differ only by a suffix ("write", "writes", "writing") are counted as separate tokens, not grouped together — the tool does exact-string frequency, not word-stem/lemma-based frequency, so it won't automatically catch overuse of a word family across its different forms.
Working with words at the letter level? Our sister site SnagWord covers the game side of the same problem — unscrambling letters, Scrabble/Wordle solving, and dictionary lookups — for when a tool like this one turns up a word you want to dig into further.
Related tools
FAQ
- How is this different from the keyword density checker?
- Keyword density checks one term you specify and reports it as a percentage of total words — you have to already suspect the word. Word frequency analysis ranks every word in the text unprompted, so it surfaces overused words you didn't think to check for. Use frequency analysis for open-ended editing and density checking for verifying one specific target phrase.
- Does it group singular and plural forms together?
- No — "tool" and "tools" are counted as two separate entries, since this is an exact-token frequency count rather than a linguistic stem-based analysis. If you're checking overall usage of a word family, you may need to mentally combine related forms from the list.
- Why are common words like "the" and "and" at the top of my list?
- That's expected in any natural-language text — function words are simply the most frequent words in English by a wide margin. Turn on the stop-word filter (if you want content words specifically) to hide them and see which meaningful words repeat most.
- Can I export the frequency list?
- The ranked list is displayed on the page as you type or paste, and you can copy it out manually the same way you would any other text on the page — there's no server-side account or file storage involved, consistent with this site's fully client-side design.
- How large a document can I check for word frequency?
- There's no hard document-size cap. A whole novel manuscript will tally noticeably slower in the live ranking than a single blog post would, simply because there are more unique tokens to sort and count, but for anything up to normal article length the ranking updates instantly as you type.