Guide
Counting word and phrase frequency in a text
A frequency list shows what a text is really made of. Writers use it to find the word they lean on too often. Marketers check whether a page actually uses the phrases customers search for. Researchers and teachers look at the vocabulary of a transcript, a speech or a set of survey answers. Paste the text and the table is ready instantly.
Words or phrases
Single words are the starting point, but phrases often tell you more: “customer service” and “cold brew” mean something that “customer” and “brew” alone do not. Switch to two-word or three-word phrases to count every sequence of that length. When common words are left out, a phrase is skipped if it starts or ends with one, so you get “cold brew coffee” rather than “of the coffee”.
Leaving out common words
In almost every English text the most frequent words are the, and, of, to and a. They tell you little, so they are hidden by default. They are still part of the word total, which means each word’s share is its proportion of the whole text, exactly as a reader experiences it. Raise the shortest-word setting to hide very short words as well, or turn on numbers if figures matter in your text.
Reading the table
Each row shows the word or phrase, how many times it occurs and its share of all words. Words are compared without regard to capitals unless you choose case-sensitive counting, which separates names like Apple from the fruit. The screen shows the top 300 rows; download the CSV for the complete list, ready to sort and filter in Excel or Google Sheets.
Keyword density, sensibly
Type a word or phrase into “Keyword density of” to see how often it occurs and what percentage of all words it accounts for. A phrase of two words that appears five times in a 500-word text has a density of 2 %. Search engines do not reward a particular density, and repeating a phrase to reach a target makes text worse to read. Use the number to catch accidental overuse, or to confirm that a page mentions its topic at all.
Examples of use
An editor pastes a chapter and notices that “suddenly” appears forty times. A shop owner compares the phrases on a product page with the words customers use in reviews. A teacher counts the vocabulary of a reading passage before choosing it for a class. A researcher counts recurring terms in interview answers as a first step of coding them.
Your text stays here
The analysis runs in your browser, so unpublished drafts, client copy and research data never leave your device.
A worked example
In a short paragraph about cold brew coffee, the single-word list puts “coffee” and “cold” at the top, each with its count and share of all words. Switching to two-word phrases shows “cold brew” as the leading phrase, which the single-word list could not reveal. Typing “cold brew” into the keyword box gives its exact count and density, for example 5 times in 70 words, or about 14 %, a sign the text repeats it a lot.
Related tools
Get totals and reading time with the Word Counter, check sentence difficulty with the Readability Checker, and clean the text before counting with Remove Punctuation.
Checked against the current version of the Word Frequency Counter on .