Word Frequency Counter

Count how often each word appears in your text and see a sorted frequency list with totals, unique-word counts, and percentages. Useful for keyword density checks, writing analysis, and spotting repeated words.

Whether you call it word frequency counter or keyword density, this free tool handles it instantly in your browser.

Enter text

34 chars9 words

Options

Count

Ignore common words (the, and, of)

Case sensitive

Word frequencyLive preview

Total words: 9 Unique words: 6 Used once: 4 Average word length: 2.9 charactersthe 3 33.3% #################### cat 2 22.2% ############# mat 1 11.1% ####### on 1 11.1% ####### ran 1 11.1% ####### sat 1 11.1% #######

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Example usage

Example input

the cat sat on the mat the cat ran

Example output

Total words: 9 Unique words: 6 the 3 (33.3%) cat 2 (22.2%) mat 1 (11.1%) on 1 (11.1%) ran 1 (11.1%) sat 1 (11.1%)

Batch Processing

Enter multiple inputs, one per line. Each line will be processed separately.

Input (one per line)

Results

How it works

Paste or type the text you want to analyze.
Each word is counted and the list is sorted by how often it appears.
Review totals, unique-word counts, and the percentage share of each word.

Use cases

Check keyword density when writing SEO content.

Find overused words in essays, articles, and copy.

Analyze survey responses and feedback for common terms.

Study vocabulary distribution in any block of text.

What word frequencies reveal about writing

Roughly half of everyday English text is built from only about 100 distinct words — the, of, and, to and their kin — a manifestation of Zipf’s law, where a word’s frequency is inversely proportional to its rank. That means the interesting signal in your own frequency list starts below the function words: the first content words to appear high in the ranking are, quite literally, what your text is about.

Editors use this to catch verbal tics (everyone has two or three pet words — "really", "actually", "just" — that repeat far more than intended), and researchers use the same counts for content analysis of interviews and survey responses.

Keyword density: useful metric, outdated tactic

For SEO, the percentages this tool shows are diagnostic rather than a target. Modern search engines penalize keyword stuffing, so the old advice of hitting a specific density is obsolete; what remains useful is the sanity check. If your primary topic never appears in the top content words, the page probably is not really about it. If a single keyword exceeds several percent of all words, it likely reads as spam to humans and algorithms alike. Write naturally, then verify here.

Repeated phrases matter more than repeated words

Single-word frequency is a blunt instrument. The top of the list is always the, of, and and to, and once you exclude those what remains is mostly the subject of the text, which you already knew. The two- and three-word phrase modes are usually more revealing, because repeated phrasing is what actually makes writing feel repetitive — and unlike a repeated word, a repeated phrase is nearly always accidental.

Phrases are counted within sentences rather than across them, so a pair of words that happens to straddle a full stop is not treated as a phrase. Only phrases appearing more than once are listed, because a phrase used once is not a pattern. If nothing appears twice, that is a good sign rather than an empty result.

Character frequency answers a different kind of question entirely: cryptogram and cipher work, checking which characters a constrained field actually contains, or confirming that a supposedly ASCII file really is. It is the mode to reach for when the unit of interest is the character rather than the word.

SEO