Word Frequency Counter — Count How Often Each Word Appears
Frequency is the count; density is that count as a share of the text. If a keyword appears 12 times in an 800-word page, its density is 12 ÷ 800 = 1.5%. The table below gives you both numbers for every word at once, so you do not have to pick the word first.
The range worth aiming for is 0.5–2% for a target keyword. Below that a page reads as if it is about something else; above 3% it reads as if it was written for a crawler.
Single words here · phrases in the Keyword Density Checker · full density table ↓
The frequency table will appear here…
Paste any text and get a table of every word ranked by how often it appears, with counts and percentages. Writers use it to catch crutch words, SEO specialists to check keyword frequency and density, students to measure vocabulary — all without the text ever leaving your browser.
What the percentage column is telling you
Every word's percentage is its keyword density: occurrences ÷ counted words. Google has published no target since it stopped rewarding raw repetition, so these bands are what experienced on-page work converges on rather than a rule anyone enforces.
| Density | What it usually means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| 0% | The word never appears. Search engines have nothing to match the query against. | Put it in the H1, the first paragraph, and one subheading. |
| 0.1–0.5% | Mentioned in passing — once or twice in a 1,000-word page. | Fine for a long article, thin for a short landing page. |
| 0.5–2% | The range nearly every on-page guide lands on. Reads like normal prose. | Leave it alone. |
| 2–3% | Noticeably repetitive. A reader starts to feel the word. | Swap a third of the occurrences for synonyms or pronouns. |
| above 3% | Stuffing. Google's Panda update in 2011 made this actively harmful. | Rewrite the paragraphs where it clusters. |
One catch worth knowing: with Hide common words on, the denominator is the meaningful words that remain, not the whole text. Percentages roughly double. That is the right measure for comparing vocabulary between two drafts, and the wrong one for checking a density target — untick it first.
Which counter do you actually want?
| If you need… | Use |
|---|---|
| How often each single word occurs, with percentages | This page |
| Two- and three-word phrases, or a verdict on one focus keyword | Keyword Density Checker |
| Just the totals — words, characters, sentences, reading time | Word Counter |
| The same frequency table as a picture, for a slide or a report | Word Cloud Generator |
What counts as one word
Two counters disagreeing on the same text almost always disagree here. Ours splits on Unicode letter and digit categories, treating apostrophes and hyphens as joiners.
| Input | Counted as | Entries | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| don't | 1 word | don't | Apostrophes join, they don't split. |
| well-known | 1 word | well-known | Hyphens join too — a compound is one entry. |
| state-of-the-art | 1 word | state-of-the-art | Any number of hyphens, still one token. |
| COVID-19 | 1 word | covid-19 | Digits count as word characters; case folded unless you turn case sensitivity on. |
| $1,200.50 | 3 words | 1 · 200 · 50 | Punctuation splits numbers. Strip figures before analysing prose. |
| e-mail — email | 2 words | e-mail · email | Spelling variants are different strings and are counted separately. |
| run, runs, running | 3 words | run · runs · running | No stemming. Word forms are counted as written — see the FAQ. |
| naïve · Москва · 東京 | 3 words | naïve · москва · 東京 | Unicode letters, so accented, Cyrillic and CJK text all work. |
The shape a normal frequency table has
Word frequencies follow Zipf's law: the second most common word appears about half as often as the first, the third about a third as often, and so on. Below are the real figures from the Brown Corpus — a million words of edited American English — which is roughly what any long English text converges on. Compare the top of your own table against it: a content word that has climbed into this territory is the one to cut.
| Rank | Word | Share of all words |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | the | 6.9% |
| 2 | of | 3.6% |
| 3 | and | 2.8% |
| 4 | to | 2.6% |
| 5 | a | 2.3% |
| 6 | in | 2.1% |
| 7 | that | 1.0% |
| 8 | is | 1.0% |
| 9 | was | 1.0% |
| 10 | he | 0.9% |
The top ten function words take roughly a quarter of any English text. That is why Hide common words exists, and why a keyword at 3% is further out on the curve than it sounds — it would be sitting between and and of.
How it works
- 1 Paste your text Click the input area and paste or type the text you want to analyse. The frequency table updates as you type — there is no Submit button and nothing is uploaded.
- 2 Hide the words you don't care about Tick 'Hide common words' to drop the, of, and, is and about 240 other function words, or raise the minimum word length. What is left is the vocabulary that carries meaning.
- 3 Read the percentage column Each word's percentage is its density — its share of the counted words. For a target keyword, 0.5–2% is the range most on-page guides recommend.
- 4 Export if you need it elsewhere Download CSV opens straight in Excel or Google Sheets, UTF-8 encoded so accented and Cyrillic words survive the trip.
Your data stays private
All processing happens entirely in your browser. No files, text, or data are ever sent to our servers. You can disconnect from the internet and this tool will still work.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I count how many times a word appears in a text?
- Paste the text into the box above. The table lists every distinct word with its number of occurrences, sorted from most to least frequent, and updates as you type. To find one specific word, use your browser's Ctrl+F on the table — the words are in plain text.
- What is keyword frequency, and how is it different from keyword density?
- Frequency is the raw count — how many times the word occurs. Density is that count divided by the total number of words, expressed as a percentage. A keyword appearing 12 times is frequency; 12 out of 800 words, or 1.5%, is density. The table above gives you both columns.
- What is a good keyword density?
- There is no threshold Google publishes, and there has not been one since the Panda update in 2011. In practice 0.5–2% reads naturally, 2–3% starts to feel repetitive, and anything above 3% reads as written for a crawler. Use the number as a sanity check in both directions — a keyword that appears once in 2,000 words is as much of a problem as one that appears forty times.
- How do I count two- and three-word phrases?
- This page counts single words. For phrase frequency — two-word and three-word n-grams, plus a verdict on a focus keyword — use the Keyword Density Checker, which is built for exactly that.
- What counts as one word?
- Any run of letters or digits, with apostrophes and hyphens treated as joiners: don't and well-known are one word each, not two or three. Punctuation splits. Unicode is fully supported, so accented Latin, Cyrillic and CJK text all count correctly.
- Why is my count different from the one in Microsoft Word?
- Word counts space-separated tokens, so $1,200.50 is one word to it and three to us, and it has no notion of distinct words at all. If you only need a total, use the Word Counter; this page is about the distribution, not the total.
- Does it group run, runs and running together?
- No. The counter reports word forms exactly as they appear, with no stemming or lemmatisation. That is deliberate — stemming is language-specific and gets English irregulars wrong often enough to be misleading. Set the minimum length to 4–5 and read the related forms as a group, or search the table for the shared stem.
- Is the counter case-sensitive?
- By default no — 'Word' and 'word' are counted together. Turn on the case-sensitive option to count them separately, which is what you want when you are counting proper nouns or acronyms.
- What does 'Hide common words' remove?
- About 250 English and Russian function words — articles, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs. With it on, the percentage column becomes each word's share of the remaining meaningful words, so the numbers rise; that is the measure to use when comparing your vocabulary against a competitor's, not against a raw density target.
- Can I analyse a competitor's page?
- Yes — copy the body text of their page and paste it here. Leave out navigation, sidebars and footers, which repeat sitewide and will skew every count. What you are looking for is the content words they use that you do not.
- Is there a limit on how much text I can paste?
- No fixed limit. Counting is linear, so a full novel finishes in well under a second on a normal laptop. The on-screen table shows the top 200 entries to keep scrolling manageable; the CSV export contains every word.
- Does my text leave my device?
- No. All counting happens in your browser with JavaScript. Nothing is uploaded, logged, or stored on any server — you can disconnect from the internet and the tool keeps working.