Free online tool
Word Frequency Counter
Discover the words you repeat most — useful for editors, students, and SEO writers.
| # | Word | Count | % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paste some text above. | |||
Why word frequency matters
Every writer has crutch words — the ones that quietly repeat across a draft and dull the prose. Word frequency counting surfaces them so you can vary vocabulary, tighten copy, and avoid the kind of unconscious repetition that makes an essay sound flat. Editors have been running this analysis by hand for a century; doing it in your browser makes it a five-second sanity check instead of a chore.
SEO and content strategy uses
The same tool is invaluable for on-page SEO. Once you decide which two or three keywords a page should target, this counter tells you whether those terms actually appear frequently enough in the copy — and whether you've accidentally over-optimised to the point of keyword stuffing. A target keyword appearing 1–2% of the time is healthy; 4%+ starts to look spammy to both readers and search engines.
How the tool works
Text is lowercased and split into words using a Unicode-aware boundary regex. When the stop-word filter is enabled, extremely common words (the, and, is, of, to…) are removed so the interesting content words rise to the top. Percentages are relative to the counted words, not the raw character count, which is what most SEO writers actually care about.
+What counts as a 'word'?
A run of two or more Latin letters. Numbers and single-letter tokens are skipped so the results stay meaningful.
+Is stemming applied?
No — 'run' and 'running' are counted separately. Add stemming in your own editor if you need it.
+How large a document can I paste?
Comfortably up to about 100,000 words. For book-length manuscripts, split into chapters.
Finding the words a piece of writing leans on too heavily
Running a finished draft through a word frequency count is one of the fastest ways to catch overused words that a spellchecker will never flag — 'very', 'just', 'really', and a writer's own personal crutch words tend to surface immediately near the top of the list once articles and prepositions are filtered out.
Every writer develops these habits without noticing, because a crutch word feels invisible in the moment of drafting; it's only when a tool tallies every instance across three thousand words that the pattern becomes obvious enough to actually fix during a revision pass.
SEO keyword density, with a caveat
Keyword density as a ranking factor lost most of its influence years ago, but a frequency count is still useful for a different reason: it shows whether a target keyword and its natural variations appear often enough to read as clearly on-topic, or so often that a page reads as stuffed and awkward to an actual reader.
Stop words skew raw counts
Without filtering, words like 'the', 'and', and 'to' will dominate any frequency list regardless of subject matter, since they make up a large share of ordinary English text; the useful signal usually starts a few entries down, once those common function words are excluded or ignored by eye.
For transcripts and interviews, frequency counts also surface filler words like 'um' or repeated phrases a speaker leans on, which is handy when cleaning a transcript down to a tighter quote.
Using frequency data during editing, not just after
Checking word frequency midway through a long piece, rather than only at the end, catches repetition early enough to fix it without a full rewrite — noticing at the 1,000-word mark that 'essentially' has already appeared six times is far more useful than discovering it at 4,000 words when reworking every instance means rereading the whole draft.
Comparing frequency lists between drafts of the same piece is also a quick way to verify an edit actually reduced repetition rather than just moving the same overused word to a different paragraph.
Research and content-gap uses
Pasting in several competing articles on the same topic and comparing their most frequent meaningful terms is a fast, low-effort way to spot phrases and subtopics that keep coming up across a niche, which can point toward what a new piece of content needs to cover to feel thorough rather than superficial.
A note on how phrases get missed
Single-word frequency counts miss repeated multi-word phrases entirely — a piece that says 'in order to' six times won't flag any individual word as suspicious, since 'in', 'order', and 'to' are all common on their own, which is why phrase-level rereading still matters even after checking word-level frequency.
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