About the Word Frequency Counter
Frequency is the fastest way to see what a draft is actually about. Every word is counted without regard to case, then listed from most to least common as a count and the word separated by a tab, so the whole thing pastes into a spreadsheet as two clean columns. Ties break alphabetically, which keeps the output stable between runs of the same document.
A word is a run of letters, digits or apostrophes, and anything else separates. Contractions therefore stay in one piece rather than splitting at the apostrophe, while hyphenated compounds break into their parts.
Two details shape the numbers. The straight apostrophe belongs to a word but the curly one a word processor inserts does not, so a document typed in Word can list the two halves of a contraction as separate entries; normalise the quote characters first when the counts matter. And the word pattern covers Latin letters, so Cyrillic, Greek and CJK text is treated as separators and largely vanishes from the table.
Stop words such as the and and are counted like anything else. They dominate the top of the list and are easy to ignore or filter out in the spreadsheet, which is usually less work than guessing at a stop list. For the distinct vocabulary with no counts attached, use Unique Words, and Word Counter for totals and reading time.
How to use
- Paste the text.
- Read the words sorted by frequency.
- Copy into a spreadsheet for a keyword density table.
Common questions
- Is counting case-sensitive?
- No. "The" and "the" are counted together.
- Are stop words excluded?
- No, every word is counted. Remove common words afterwards if you want only content words.
- How are ties ordered?
- Words with the same count are listed alphabetically.