About the Word Frequency Counter
This word frequency counter lists every word in your text with how many times it appears and what share of the text it makes up. Switch to two- or three-word phrases to find repeated expressions such as "credit card" or "how to save", and filter out common filler words like "the" and "and" to focus on the words that carry meaning.
Writers use it to spot overused words before editing; SEO writers use it as a keyword density checker to confirm the main topic appears naturally without stuffing; students and researchers use it for quick text analysis of essays, transcripts and survey answers.
Counting is case-insensitive ("Budget" and "budget" are the same word), and contractions or hyphenated words count as single words. Density is the share of all words in the text taken up by the term, so it is comparable across short and long documents. Your text is processed in the browser and never uploaded.
How to use the word frequency counter
- 1Paste the text you want to analyse.
- 2Choose single words, two-word phrases or three-word phrases.
- 3Keep "ignore common words" on to focus on meaningful terms.
- 4Raise the minimum word length to hide very short words if needed.
- 5Read the ranking and density table to find overused words or check keyword coverage.
Formula and method
The text is split into words — runs of letters or digits, keeping internal apostrophes and hyphens — and lower-cased. In phrase mode, every run of two or three consecutive words forms a phrase (sliding one word at a time). Each distinct word or phrase is counted and the list is ranked by count, with ties in alphabetical order.
Density divides the number of words covered by a term (occurrences × phrase length) by the total number of words in the text, so a two-word phrase appearing 5 times in 500 words has a density of 2%. Ignoring common words removes articles, pronouns and prepositions from single-word results and drops phrases that begin or end with one; the total word count still includes them.
- occurrences
- How many times the word or phrase appears
- words in term
- 1 for single words, 2 or 3 for phrases
- total words
- All words in the text, including common words
Worked examples
Budgeting paragraph, common words ignored
The paragraph has 36 words. With filler words removed, 18 distinct words remain and "budget" leads with 3 occurrences ("Budgeting" counts as a different word), a density of 3 ÷ 36 = 8.33%. "every", "money" and "track" follow with 2 each.
Including common words
Counting every word raises the distinct total to 27. "budget" still leads with 3, followed by seven words tied at 2 — a, and, every, money, track, you and your — which are listed alphabetically.
Two-word phrases in a product description
"credit card" appears 4 times in 19 words. Each occurrence covers 2 words, so its density is 4 × 2 ÷ 19 = 42.11% — a clear sign of keyword stuffing in a real article.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good keyword density for SEO?+
There is no official target. Search engines reward natural writing, and most SEO guides suggest keeping a main keyword around 1–2% and avoiding anything that reads as repetitive. Google explicitly warns against keyword stuffing.
How is keyword density calculated?+
Keyword density is the number of times a keyword appears, multiplied by the number of words in the keyword, divided by the total word count, times 100. Five uses of a single word in 500 words is 1%.
Why are words like "the" and "and" missing?+
They are filtered as common words so the ranking shows meaningful terms. Turn off "ignore common words" to count every word, which is useful for linguistic analysis or checking filler usage.
Are "budget" and "budgeting" counted together?+
No. The counter matches exact word forms (case-insensitively), so plurals and other forms such as budget, budgets and budgeting are listed separately. Add their counts together if you want a combined total.
How can I find my most overused words?+
Paste your draft with common words ignored and look at the top of the ranking. Words other than your main topic that appear far more often than the rest are good candidates to replace with synonyms.