Word Frequency Counter
See how often each word and phrase appears, ranked from most to least.
The word frequency counter
Paste your text and every word is counted and ranked from most to least frequent, with its count and its share of all words. Switch to 2-word or 3-word phrases to find repeated phrasing; a phrase never runs across a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or line break. Ignore case and Skip common words refine the table, which you can copy or download as CSV.
About the word frequency counter
The WordBench word frequency counter tallies how many times each word appears in your text and ranks the results from most to least frequent. Paste an article, a transcript, or a list and see the words that carry the most weight, with a count, a share of the total and a bar for each.
Frequency is a quiet but revealing signal. It shows which terms a piece of writing leans on, where a word is repeated more than you realized, and whether a draft is circling the same few ideas. Switch from Words to 2-word phrases or 3-word phrases and the same table ranks repeated phrasing instead, which is where a crutch expression or an over-used keyword phrase shows up. Editors use it to catch crutch words, and SEO writers use it to check that a target term appears often enough without being overused.
Ignore case, on by default, counts Report and report together. Skip common words drops words such as the, and and of, or a phrase made only of them, so the table starts with the words that carry meaning; leave it off and every word you typed is counted. Click a column heading to sort by count or alphabetically, then copy the table into a spreadsheet or download it as a CSV file. It all runs locally, and nothing is uploaded.
How are 2-word and 3-word phrases counted?
A phrase is a run of two or three words in a row, also called an n-gram: in the team shipped the update, the 2-word phrases are the team, team shipped, shipped the and the update. Each position counts once, so a phrase that appears five times anywhere in the text gets a count of five.
A phrase never runs across the end of a sentence or a line. A full stop, a question mark, an exclamation mark and a line break all close one off, so the last word of one sentence and the first word of the next never form a phrase. A full stop followed by a digit does not end a sentence, so 3.5 and 1,000 each stay one word. Commas, colons and semicolons do not break a phrase.
Share is a phrase's count divided by all the phrases of that length in the text, so the shares add up to 100 percent, give or take rounding, until Skip common words takes rows out. Phrases with the same count share a rank.
Who uses it
Worked example
Paste "The team shipped the update. The update was small, but the team was proud of the update."
With ignore case on, the counter ranks the by 5, update by 3, and team and was by 2 each, then the remaining words once apiece. The bars make the leaders obvious at a glance, so you can see that update and the are doing a lot of the lifting.
Switch to 2-word phrases and the update leads with 3, ahead of the team with 2. Tick Skip common words and the, was, but and of drop out of the word table, leaving update and team on top. In the phrase table of the and but the drop out, while the update stays, because a phrase is only skipped when every word in it is a common word.
Frequently asked questions
How does it decide what a word is? A word is a run of letters, digits, apostrophes, and hyphens, so contractions and hyphenated terms are counted as single words. A number written with a separator, such as 3.5 or 1,000, is one word. Quote marks and hyphens at the edge of a word are dropped, and punctuation and spaces separate one word from the next.
How does it decide what a word is?
A word is a run of letters, digits, apostrophes, and hyphens, so contractions and hyphenated terms are counted as single words. A number written with a separator, such as 3.5 or 1,000, is one word. Quote marks and hyphens at the edge of a word are dropped, and punctuation and spaces separate one word from the next.
What are n-grams, and how do I count phrases?
An n-gram is a run of n words in a row: a 2-gram is a 2-word phrase such as the update, and a 3-gram a 3-word phrase. Pick 2-word phrases or 3-word phrases above the text box and the table ranks phrases instead of single words. A phrase never runs across a full stop, a question mark, an exclamation mark or a line break.
Can I download the results as a CSV file?
Yes. Download CSV saves every row, not only the rows on screen, with four columns: rank, the word or phrase, its count and its share as a percentage. The file is UTF-8 with a byte order mark, so Excel shows accented letters and other alphabets correctly when you open it. Copy table puts every row on your clipboard instead, tab separated, ready to paste into a spreadsheet.
What does ignore case do?
With ignore case on, the same word is counted together regardless of capitalization, so Report and report add to one total. Turn it off to count each casing separately, which can matter for names and acronyms.
Does it skip common filler words?
Only when you ask it to. By default every word is counted, including the and of, so you get a complete frequency picture. Tick Skip common words to drop the words on WordBench's published stop-word list, and any phrase made only of them, from the table. The shares are still worked out against all the words in your text.
Is there a limit on how much text I can analyze?
You can paste large passages. The table shows the 50 most frequent entries first and Show all expands it to as many as 1,000 rows, while Copy table and Download CSV always include every row. The whole analysis runs in your browser without uploading anything.
Exactly what this tool counts, and why the result can differ from your word processor, is written out on the methodology page. Platform character limits, with the unit each one counts in and the date it was checked, are on the character limits pages.