WordieWord Frequency Counter
Paste a text and see which words it uses most, with counts and percentages. Hide common function words to surface the vocabulary that actually carries the meaning, then export the list.
What does a word frequency counter do?
A word frequency counter splits a text into words, counts how many times each one occurs and sorts them from most to least common. It answers questions like "which words does this article lean on?", "am I repeating myself?" and "which vocabulary should I learn before reading this book?". This counter is case-insensitive, keeps contractions and hyphenated words together, and can hide about 180 common English function words and contractions.
How the counting works
The text is lowercased and split into tokens made of letters and digits, allowing internal apostrophes and hyphens (don't, well-known). Each token is one running word. Then:
count(word)is the number of times that exact form appears.% of words = count(word) / total words × 100, where the total includes stop words even when they are hidden, so percentages stay comparable.unique wordsis the number of different forms, also called types.
Word forms are not merged: learn, learns and learned are three entries. Linguists would group them into one lemma or word family, which needs a dictionary and is beyond a quick counter.
How to interpret a word frequency list
Word frequencies in natural text follow Zipf's law: a handful of words are extremely common, and most words appear once or twice. That shape explains what you will see.
| What you see | What it usually means | Useful action |
|---|---|---|
| Top words are the, of, and, to | Stop words are included | Tick the stop word filter to see topic words |
| A content word in the top 5 | It is the text's main topic | Learn it first if it is new to you |
| Same non-topic word near the top of your own writing | Repetition | Vary it or cut it |
| Most words appear only once | Normal for any text | Focus on words that repeat across several texts |
For language learners, the most valuable words in a list are the ones that are frequent in the text but unknown to you. Those give the biggest gain in comprehension per word learned. Research on lexical coverage (Nation, 2006) shows why: a few recurring unknown words can stop you from following a whole text.
Limitations
- No lemmatization. Inflected forms are counted separately, so a word's real importance can be spread across several rows.
- No sense detection. "Bank" the river and "bank" the institution count as one word.
- Stop word lists are a choice. The built-in list covers articles, pronouns, auxiliaries, common prepositions and conjunctions. For some tasks, such as studying style, those words are exactly what you want to see; untick the filter.
- Short texts are noisy. In a 200-word text, a word appearing twice may be chance. Counts become meaningful with thousands of words.
Related reading
- High-frequency words and why they come first
- Lexical diversity calculator for TTR, MATTR and MTLD
- How to learn vocabulary from reading
- Sentence mining guide
How to use this tool
- Paste your text into the box (a sample is loaded so you can see the output).
- Tick or untick Exclude stop words to hide or show words like the, and, of.
- Set a minimum word length and how many top words to show.
- Read the table, then click Download CSV to save the full list for a spreadsheet or flashcard app.
Frequently asked questions
How do I count how many times a word appears in a text?
Paste the text into this word frequency counter. It lowercases every word, counts each one and sorts the list from most to least frequent, so you can read off any word's count.
What are stop words?
Stop words are very common function words such as the, of, and, to and is. They make up a large share of any English text but say little about its topic, so they are usually hidden in frequency lists.
Is the counter case-sensitive?
No. Capitalized and lowercase forms are counted together, so The and the are one word. Different forms such as learn and learned are still counted separately.
Can I use the list to make flashcards?
Yes. Download the CSV, remove the words you already know, and import the rest into your flashcard app or vocabulary notebook.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. Counting happens entirely in your browser, and the CSV file is created locally.
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