How this word frequency counter works
A word frequency counter breaks your text into individual words and tallies how many times each one occurs. This tool splits on anything that is not a letter or number — spaces, punctuation and line breaks — while keeping apostrophes, so contractions like don't and possessives like writer's stay intact as single words.
Once the words are counted, they are sorted from most to least frequent and the top results are shown in the table. Alongside the raw count, each word gets a keyword density figure: its number of occurrences divided by the total number of words, expressed as a percentage. Use the options to set a minimum word length, ignore common stop words, and toggle case sensitivity.
| # | Word | Count | Density % |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | the | 3 | 30.0% |
| 2 | cat | 2 | 20.0% |
| 3 | sat | 1 | 10.0% |
| 4 | on | 1 | 10.0% |
| 5 | mat | 1 | 10.0% |
| 6 | is | 1 | 10.0% |
| 7 | happy | 1 | 10.0% |
Reference note: with the stop-word filter on, the, on and is would be removed, leaving cat at the top — a clearer picture of what the text is actually about.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I find the most common words in a text?
- Paste or type the text into the tool above. It splits the text into words, counts how often each appears, and lists them from most to least frequent so the most common words sit at the top.
- What is keyword density?
- Keyword density is how often a word or phrase appears relative to the total number of words, usually shown as a percentage. It gives a rough sense of which terms a page emphasises.
- How is keyword density calculated?
- Divide the number of occurrences of a word by the total number of words, then multiply by 100. A word appearing 8 times in a 400-word article has a density of 8 ÷ 400 = 2%.
- What are stop words?
- Stop words are very common words such as the, and, of, to and is that carry little topical meaning. Filtering them out lets the most meaningful words rise to the top.
- What's a good keyword density for SEO?
- There is no magic number. Modern search engines reward natural, helpful writing rather than a target percentage, and keyword stuffing can backfire. Treat density as a sanity check and write for the reader first.
- Is my text uploaded?
- No. All counting happens locally in your browser, so your text is never sent to a server or stored. You can safely paste private or unpublished content.