Word frequency counter for every word you used

Because they win every time and tell you nothing. In ordinary English prose the single word the accounts for around six or seven per cent of everything written, and the hundred commonest words together make up roughly half of any running text — so a frequency list that includes them is the same list for a cookbook and a court judgment. The 127 function words hidden here are articles, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and auxiliary verbs; untick the box and they come straight back, which is worth doing if you are studying style rather than subject matter.

No — cat and cats are separate entries, as are run, runs and running. Collapsing them means guessing at word families, and the guesses go wrong in ways you would not notice: the standard algorithms turn universities into universiti and reduce both meeting and meet to one entry, which quietly hides the thing you were looking for. Counting the exact forms is honest about what is on the page, and if you want the family total you can add the rows up yourself in the spreadsheet.

One. An apostrophe inside a word does not split it, so don't, it's and o'clock each count once, and so do hyphenated compounds such as state-of-the-art. Numbers written with separators stay whole too, so 1,500 is a single entry rather than two. This is the same definition of a word that the rest of the site uses, so a total here always matches the one the word counter shows for the same text.

Because Find matches strings, not words. Searching for art in a document turns up article, artist, apart and heart, and Word's counter reports every one of them; this page counts whole words only, so art appears in the list exactly as often as somebody wrote the word art. The other common difference is case: Word's Find is case-insensitive by default and will merge The and the, which is what the case box above controls.

Finding the thing you cannot see in your own writing. Editors run one over a manuscript to catch the crutch word that turns up eleven times in a chapter; teachers use one to show a student that their essay leans on three verbs; translators check that a term of art has been rendered the same way throughout; researchers coding open-ended survey answers start here before they start reading. In each case the value is the same — a count is not affected by how familiar the text has become to you.

There is no limit, and the practical ceiling is your clipboard rather than this page. A 5,000-word article is tallied in about a millisecond; 144,000 words, roughly a full-length novel, takes around 26 milliseconds and still updates as you type. The full ranked list is rendered forty rows at a time with a button to show the rest, because a list of 12,000 distinct words is slow to draw, not slow to count.

Yes — Download CSV writes a three-column file of word, times used and share of text, which both open directly. Copy the list puts the same three columns on the clipboard, so you can paste into a sheet without a download at all. The share column is written with a per-cent sign, so change the column format to text if your spreadsheet insists on reinterpreting it.