Word Frequency Counter

How to count word frequency

1. Paste your text in the input box: an article, an essay, a transcript, customer reviews or survey answers.
2. Under Show, pick Single words, 2-word phrases or 3-word phrases.
3. Keep Exclude stop words (the, and, of…) ticked to hide grammatical words, and choose the Stop word language that matches your text: English or French.
4. Leave Ignore numbers ticked unless numbers matter to you, such as years or product codes.
5. Read the table: each row shows the word or phrase, its count, its share and a bar comparing it with the most frequent one. Use Rows shown to see 25, 50, 100 or all rows.
6. Click Download CSV to open the full list in a spreadsheet.

The table updates as you type; Count words refreshes it.

How words are counted

A word is a run of letters or digits. An apostrophe or hyphen between two letters keeps it together, so “don’t”, “well-known” and “peut-être” are single words. Case is ignored: “The”, “the” and “THE” are counted together.

A few normalizations make the results more useful:

• Curly and straight apostrophes are treated the same.
• In French, elided articles and pronouns are removed, so “l’homme” and “d’homme” both count as “homme”, and “qu’il” as “il”. “Aujourd’hui” stays one word.
• In English, a possessive “‘s” is removed: “Google’s” counts as “google”.

Words are not reduced to their root: “cat” and “cats” are listed separately, which keeps the counts exact and predictable.

Phrases

With 2-word or 3-word phrases, the tool counts every sequence of consecutive words, but never across punctuation: in “Paris, London and Rome”, “paris london” is not a phrase. When stop words are excluded, a phrase that starts or ends with one is skipped, while stop words in the middle are kept, so “return on investment” and “quality of life” still appear.

Phrase counts are the best way to spot the real topics of a text. Single words such as “learning” or “machine” say little on their own; “machine learning” says a lot.

Percentages and keyword density

For single words, the share is the count divided by the total number of words in the text, stop words included. This is what SEO tools call keyword density. For phrases, it is the count divided by the number of phrases of that length in the text.

As a rule of thumb, a key term that makes up several percent of a text may read as repetitive, and search engines reward natural writing rather than a target density. Use the numbers to spot overused words and missing synonyms, not to reach a quota.

Stop word lists

Stop words are very common words, such as articles, pronouns, prepositions and auxiliary verbs, that dominate any frequency count without saying much about its content. This tool uses the English (1,298 words) and French (691 words) lists of the open-source stopwords-iso collection, under the MIT license. They are broad lists: some common verbs and adverbs are included too. If a word you need is hidden, turn off the filter.