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Word Frequency Counter
Paste an essay, a speech, a transcript or meeting notes and get a ranked list of the most frequent words. Filter out common filler words to see what the text is actually about.
100% private — everything runs in your browser, nothing is ever uploaded.
What this tool does
A student submits an essay that keeps repeating the same two adjectives, a transcript needs a quick sense of which topics dominate, and an editor wants to know whether a draft leans on vague filler instead of concrete nouns. Counting words by reading is unreliable, which is where a ranked frequency list helps. Paste any text and this tool returns the most common words with their counts, with an option to ignore common filler such as the, and and of so the terms that actually carry meaning rise to the top. You can adjust how many entries to show and copy the list for a spreadsheet. It is a diagnostic, not a style judgement: a repeated word may be deliberate repetition, a topic word, or a sign that a paragraph needs rewriting.
How to use it in three steps
- Paste the essay, transcript, speech or meeting notes into the box.
- Turn on Ignore common words to hide function words and see the substantive vocabulary. Compare both views before concluding anything about the writing.
- Set how many top words to display, then read or copy the ranked list. A single dominant term is worth checking against the original text. Run the count once with filler words visible and once hidden, since the contrast is where repetition becomes obvious. Compare the two ranked lists side by side before changing any wording.
Questions people ask
Does it count different forms of a word together?
No. Run, runs and running are counted as separate strings because the tool does not stem or lemmatise. That is useful for spotting repeated phrasing but less so for measuring a concept's overall presence.
Why are numbers and short codes in the list?
Anything separated by whitespace is treated as a token, including numbers, identifiers and abbreviations. If those dominate a technical document, clean the text with the text cleaner first or interpret them separately.
Can it help me hit a word count target?
It shows distribution, not length. For a total word, character and reading-time count, use the word counter; the two tools answer different questions about the same draft.
Can I use this on a language without spaces between words?
The tokeniser splits on whitespace, so scripts that do not separate words will read as one long token and the ranked list will be unhelpful. For those texts the character and line counts in the word counter are more meaningful measures.
Privacy: The text you paste is tokenised and ranked by JavaScript inside this browser tab, so unpublished essays, internal transcripts and client material stay on your device without a single network request.
How to use it
- Paste your text into the box.
- Optionally turn on Ignore common words to skip words like the, and and of.
- Adjust how many top words to show, then copy the list or read it inline.
Why it stays private
Writers use frequency lists to catch overused words before publishing; students use them to summarise long readings. Either way the text stays on your machine — nothing is posted to a server for analysis.
Questions
How are words counted?
Sequences of letters and numbers count as words, case is ignored, and the same word in different capitalisations is merged into one entry. Numbers are counted too, which is handy for spotting repeated figures in reports.
What are stop words?
Extremely common words such as the, a, in and that that carry little meaning on their own. Filtering them out usually makes the top of the list far more informative for English text.
Does it work for Chinese or Japanese text?
Partially. Characters without spaces are counted individually, which gives a rough idea of character frequency but not word frequency — those languages need segmentation that goes beyond a quick browser tool.