Word Frequency Counter

Analyze text to find the most frequently used words and their counts.

How to Use Word Frequency Counter

1

Paste your text

Enter the content you want to analyze word frequency for.
2

View word frequencies

See each word ranked by how often it appears in the text.
3

Filter common words

Toggle stop words to focus on meaningful content words.

Tested tool guide Text and writing tools Checked August 16, 2026

What Word Frequency Counter does, with a checked example

Paste any block of text and this tool breaks it into individual words, then reports each word with the number of times it appears, ranked from most to least frequent. Everything runs locally in the browser, so the text never leaves the page. The result people are least prepared for: the top of the list is almost always dominated by function words like "the" and "and", which say nothing about your subject matter, and each word form is counted separately, so "run", "runs", and "running" never share a row. Read past the first few entries to reach the words that actually describe the text.

Worked example

A concrete input and expected output from the current implementation.

Input

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The dog sleeps, the fox watches.

Expected output

15 words counted, 10 unique.
the - 4
dog - 2
fox - 2
brown - 1
jumps - 1
lazy - 1
over - 1
quick - 1
sleeps - 1
watches - 1

Case is folded and punctuation stripped before counting, so "The" and "the" land in one bucket and trailing periods vanish. The fifteen tokens reconcile as: "the" four times (twice in each sentence, once capitalized and once lowercase per sentence), "dog" and "fox" twice each, and the seven remaining words once each.

How the result is produced

Splitting into tokens

The text is divided at whitespace and punctuation boundaries, surrounding punctuation is stripped, and capitalization is folded so "The" and "the" increment the same tally. Each token adds one to a count, and at the end the entries are sorted by count from highest to lowest, with equal counts ordered alphabetically. Numbers and quoted strings are handled as words if they contain no internal separators.

What counts as a word

The rules for tricky characters decide a lot of the output. Apostrophes and hyphens may keep a token whole ("don't", "well-known") or split it into pieces depending on the splitter used, and a string like "3.14" may count as a word or be discarded. If a count looks wrong, check how the tool treated these characters first - that explains most surprises.

Good uses

Edit your own writing: paste a draft and scan for crutch words like "very", "just", and "actually" that repeat more than you realized and that no spellchecker will flag.
After a long meeting or interview, paste the transcript and see which names, projects, or topics actually dominated the conversation instead of relying on memory.
Before publishing web copy, check whether the phrases you want to emphasize genuinely recur, and catch words repeated so often the text reads as keyword stuffing.

Limits and checks

Function words swamp the top rows: in ordinary English, "the", "and", "of", and "to" occupy the first positions, so reading only the top five entries tells you little about the content.
Counts are per exact word form: "run", "runs", and "running" are separate rows, so a low count for one form does not mean the concept is rare in the text.
Results depend on the tokenizer: case folding, contraction handling, hyphenation, and whether numbers count all vary between tools, so this tool's counts may not match another counter run on the same text.

Common questions

Why is "the" at the top? I need the words that actually matter.

Because function words outnumber content words in any ordinary English text, so they always lead the list. The tool counts every word and does not filter stop words on its own. Skip the first few rows and read the nouns and verbs below them - that is where the subject of the text shows up.

Does it count "The" and "the" as the same word?

Most word frequency counters fold capitalization, so both forms share a single count. The reliable way to settle it for this tool: paste a short sentence that contains both "The" and "the" and check whether they appear on one row or two. That test answers the question faster than any documentation.

References and verification

The example and behavioral notes were checked against the browser implementation. Standards and primary references below define the relevant format, formula, or platform behavior.