See exactly which words you use, and how often
Paste any text and this counter tallies every distinct word, sorted from most to least frequent, with each word's share of the total. Filter the view to your top 25, 50 or 100 words, hide common stopwords, or search the table for one specific term to see how often it really appears.
What the numbers tell you
- Repetition: one word above roughly 3 to 4 percent of a short text usually deserves synonyms.
- Coverage: in SEO writing, your target topic terms should appear, but naturally, not stuffed.
- Voice: frequency tables expose habits, like starting every other sentence with the same word.
For overall counts, reading time and a quick top-10 keyword view, try the Word Counter.
How the counting works under the hood
The counter first breaks your text into individual words, matching runs of letters and digits and treating every word case-insensitively, so "Garden", "garden" and "GARDEN" all land in the same row. It then walks through the word list once, keeping a running tally for each distinct word it meets. Percentages are worked out against the total number of words in the full text, and that detail matters: when you hide common words, their rows disappear from the table, but the remaining percentages still describe each word's share of the whole text, not just of the visible rows. Sorting places the highest counts first and breaks ties alphabetically, so equal words are easy to scan. The search box filters rows by partial match, which means searching for "photo" surfaces both "photo" and "photos", making it simple to add up a word and its plural. Finally, the top 25, 50 and 100 controls just slice the finished, sorted table, so changing the view never changes the underlying counts.
A worked example
Consider this short passage from a property listing: "Good photos sell homes. Good photos show light, space and detail. Buyers trust homes that look bright, and bright photos help buyers decide." The passage has 23 words in total. With common words hidden, the table shows "photos" at the top with 3 uses, or about 13 percent of the text. "Good", "homes", "buyers" and "bright" each appear twice, at roughly 8.7 percent each, and everything else appears once. Two lessons stand out. First, the writer's real selling points, light, space and detail, are each mentioned only once, so the description could say more about them. Second, percentages in a very short text swing wildly, because a single extra use of a word moves it by over 4 points. In a 1,000 word article, that same extra use would move the figure by just 0.1 percent, which is why frequency percentages are most trustworthy on longer texts.
Tips for getting better results
- Analyze section by section: running a whole book chapter at once hides local habits, while pasting one section at a time shows exactly where a pet word clusters.
- Search for word families: use the search box to group a word with its other forms, such as "write", "writes" and "writing", because the table counts each form as its own row.
- Compare drafts in a spreadsheet: copy the table before and after editing into a spreadsheet and place the versions side by side to see whether you really reduced the words you were overusing.
- Turn common words back on for style checks: with stopwords visible you can spot habits like overusing "very" or starting sentences with "and", which the filtered view is designed to hide.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Chasing a perfect percentage: there is no ideal density for most writing, and forcing a word up to an arbitrary figure produces text that sounds mechanical to a human reader.
- Reading meaning into tiny samples: a two sentence caption will give almost any content word a huge percentage, so judge short texts by raw counts instead of percentages.
- Forgetting that synonyms split the count: if you alternate between "buy", "purchase" and "order", each row looks modest while the idea itself is repeated far more often than any single row suggests.
- Editing only the top row: repetition problems often sit just below the leader, in a cluster of words used eight or nine times each, so scan the top ten rows before you start revising.