Every writer has words they lean on. “Really”, “just”, “very”, “actually”. A report may repeat the same noun twelve times in a paragraph because you were too deep in the subject to notice. A word frequency counter shows you what you have been doing, in plain numbers, by ranking every word by how often it appears.
Paste your text and a table appears with the most used words, how many times each occurs, and what share of the text that makes it.
Reading the results
By default every word is counted, so the top of the list will be “the”, “and”, “of” and “to”. That is normal and not very useful. Tick “Skip common words” to hide them. What is left is usually the subject matter: in an article about gardening, you would see “soil”, “plants” and “water” near the top. This is the quickest way to find the keywords of a piece of writing, whether it is your own or somebody else’s.
“Skip words shorter than” removes noise from small words you do not want in the list, and the top-N setting controls how many rows are shown. Case is ignored unless you untick that option, so “Garden” and “garden” are counted as one.
The share column is a percentage of the words counted after your filters. If you skip common words, the share is of the remaining ones, so it will look higher than a share of the whole text.
What counts as a word
A run of letters or numbers, with apostrophes and hyphens kept inside it. “Don’t” and “well-known” are one word each; a number like “2026” is a word too. Punctuation around a word is ignored, so “end.” and “end” match.
Practical uses
Editing your own writing. Look for repeated words in the first 20 lines of the list and vary them. If the same adjective appears in half your paragraphs, it is a tic.
Checking a page for SEO. A page about “text repeaters” that never mentions the phrase more than twice, or that says it fifty times in 500 words, shows up quickly. For phrases of two or three words, the keyword density checker gives the same sort of table.
Making sense of survey answers or reviews. Paste a batch of free-text feedback and the most common nouns show you what people talk about.
Language learning. Paste a chapter of a book you are reading and learn the most frequent words first, since a small set of them covers most of any text.
Before and after
For better results, clear the punctuation clutter and filler first with remove punctuation and remove stop words. Once you have the list, the word counter gives the overall totals, and remove duplicate words turns a long run of words into a unique list.