Word Frequency Counter
Every repeated word in your draft, ranked by count and updated live — the mirror that shows you the words you lean on without noticing.
Keywords appear once you type.
Editing with a frequency table
The workflow that earns its keep: paste a finished draft, scan the top ten, and interrogate each entry — is this word doing necessary work every time, or is it a habit? Replace half the occurrences of any word that surprises you, then re-paste and watch the table flatten. Common function words are filtered so the list shows your choices, not English's.
Reading the unique-word number
Divide unique words by total words and you get a rough lexical-variety gauge: a 40-word paragraph with 35 unique words scores 0.875 — high, as short texts almost always do. That caveat is the important part: the ratio falls mechanically as texts grow, because common words must repeat, so 0.87 on a paragraph and 0.45 on a chapter can describe equally varied prose. Never compare the ratio across texts of very different lengths; do compare it across drafts of the same piece, where a rising ratio after an editing pass is direct evidence the vocabulary loosened up.
What the counter merges, and what it deliberately keeps apart
Case is folded ("The" and "the" are one entry), hyphenated words stay whole, and numbers chart like any other token. Nothing else is merged: no stemming, no lemmatization, so "run", "runs", and "running" occupy three rows. That is a feature — if three forms of the same verb all chart, that verb is carrying too much of your prose, and stemming would have hidden it. Single letters and the 74 stop words are filtered from the table (so "I" and "a" never chart), but they still count toward the totals. One editing rule of thumb: in a draft of a thousand words or more, any content word above about 2% of the text deserves a deliberate look — either it is your genuine subject, in which case fine, or it is a habit. The usual suspects are intensifiers ("very", "really"), hedges ("perhaps", "somewhat"), and each writer's private pets — the point of the table is that yours will surprise you.
Frequently asked questions
What should I look for in the frequency list?
Your tics. Every writer has default words — "just", "really", "very", "actually", intensifiers and hedges that add nothing — plus pet adjectives that repeat unnoticed. Seeing "leverage" seven times in a one-page memo is the cure.
How is this different from keyword density?
Same engine, different intent. Keyword density asks "is this text about what it should be about?" — an SEO lens. Frequency asks "what am I unconsciously repeating?" — an editing lens. The density page shows share-of-text percentages; here the raw counts are the point.
Are word forms combined?
No — "run", "runs", and "running" count separately (case is ignored). Stemming would hide exactly the repetition patterns editors want to see; if three forms of the same verb all chart, that verb is carrying too much of your prose.
What about unique-word count?
Fiction and essays typically show more vocabulary variety than technical writing, where consistent terminology is a feature, not a flaw — see "Reading the unique-word number" below for how to use the ratio without fooling yourself.
Analysis happens locally in your browser — drafts are never transmitted or stored. See the methodology page.