Word Frequency Counter

Word frequency analysis counts how many times each unique word appears in a text and expresses it as a count and a percentage of total words. It is used in SEO to measure keyword density, in editing to identify overused words, in research to analyse writing patterns, and in education to study language use. This tool produces a sortable table of every word in your text alongside its count and density percentage, so you can quickly find which terms dominate your content.

Keyword density is the percentage of times a target keyword appears relative to the total word count of a piece of content. A 500-word article where the keyword appears 5 times has a keyword density of 1%. Most SEO practitioners consider 1–2% to be a healthy range for primary keywords — enough to signal relevance to search engines without appearing repetitive or keyword-stuffed. Google has not published an official recommended density, but densities above 3–4% tend to correlate with a forced, unnatural writing style that can trigger spam filters.

Stop words are common function words — "the", "a", "and", "is", "in", "of", "to" — that appear in almost every piece of English text. They carry grammatical function but little semantic meaning on their own. In a frequency analysis, stop words will always top the table because they are so ubiquitous, drowning out the meaningful terms underneath. Excluding them lets you see which content words — nouns, verbs, adjectives — actually dominate your text. The toggle in this tool uses the same stop word list used by major SEO tools and NLP libraries.

Word count tells you the total number of words in a text — a single number. Word frequency analysis goes further: it tells you how often each individual word appears. A 500-word article might have a total word count of 500 and a frequency table of 200 unique words, with the top word appearing 12 times and most words appearing only once. Word count is a measure of length; word frequency is a measure of vocabulary and emphasis.

Yes. Paste your content, make sure "Exclude stop words" is on, and look at the density column. Any word with a density above 3% warrants attention. If your target keyword is appearing at 4% or higher, the text may feel repetitive to readers and could trigger over-optimisation signals in search engines. The density colour coding in the table flags words above 3% in red and words between 1–3% in green, making it easy to spot at a glance. Use the CSV export to take the full analysis into a spreadsheet for deeper review.