Word frequency counter
Find out how often each word appears in your text. Spot overused words and check keyword density instantly.
| # | Word | Count | Percentage | Bar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paste text above to see word frequency results. | ||||
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About word frequency analysis
Counting how often each word appears in a text is one of the oldest forms of textual analysis — medieval scholars spent lifetimes compiling concordances of the Bible by hand, indexing every occurrence of every word. The field's most famous discovery is Zipf's law, named after linguist George Kingsley Zipf, who observed in the 1930s that a text's most common word appears roughly twice as often as the second most common, three times as often as the third, and so on. English follows the pattern faithfully: "the" alone accounts for about 7% of all words in typical prose. A frequency counter turns this analysis from a lifetime's work into an instant table.
Why word frequency analysis matters for writers
Overusing the same word repeatedly makes writing feel repetitive and flat. Word frequency analysis reveals patterns in your writing that are difficult to spot by reading alone. You might discover you use the word "very" fourteen times in a five hundred word article, or that "however" appears in every other paragraph. Seeing the frequency data makes these patterns obvious and actionable — you can use the find and replace tool to substitute varied alternatives.
Word frequency for SEO and keyword density
Search engines analyze the words on a page to understand what it is about. Keyword density — the percentage of times a target keyword appears relative to total word count — is one signal search engines use to determine relevance. The percentage column in TextlyPop's word frequency counter is your keyword density for each word. Most SEO professionals recommend keeping primary keyword density between one and two percent. Higher than three percent risks appearing as keyword stuffing which search engines penalize.
Disable the Ignore stop words option to see the full picture including all common words, which gives you the most accurate percentage calculations for SEO purposes. Enable it when you want to focus only on meaningful content words.
What are stop words
Stop words are common English words that appear in almost every piece of writing — "the", "a", "an", "and", "or", "but", "in", "on", "at", "to", "for", "of", "with", "is", "was", "are", "were". Because they appear so frequently they are usually not meaningful for analysis purposes. Filtering them out reveals the words that actually define the topic and tone of your writing. TextlyPop filters over 40 common stop words when the option is enabled.
Frequently asked questions
How do I find the most repeated words in my text?
Paste your text and the frequency table appears instantly, sorted with the most-used words at the top. Each row shows the word, its raw count, and the percentage of your total word count it represents. Click any column header to re-sort alphabetically or by count, and type into the filter box to jump straight to a specific word. For a writer's overused-word check, enable Ignore stop words first — otherwise "the" and "and" will dominate the top of every list.
Does keyword density still matter for SEO?
As a ranking formula, no — modern search engines evaluate topical relevance with language models, not by counting keyword repetitions. But density still matters as a diagnostic: if your primary keyword sits far above 2–3% of total words, the page likely reads as stuffed and unnatural, which both readers and Google's spam systems dislike. Conversely, if the term you want to rank for barely appears, the page may not signal its topic clearly. Use the percentage column to catch both extremes, then write for the reader.
What is Zipf's law in simple terms?
Zipf's law says word frequency follows a predictable curve: the most common word appears about twice as often as the runner-up, three times as often as the third-place word, and so on down the ranks. It holds across languages, authors and eras — from Shakespeare to tweets — and nobody fully agrees on why. Paste any long text into the counter with stop words included and you can watch the pattern emerge in the percentage column yourself.
How many words can this tool analyze?
There is no fixed limit. Analysis runs entirely in your browser, so capacity depends on your device rather than a server quota — full articles, essays, theses and even book-length manuscripts process in well under a second on a typical laptop. Because nothing is uploaded, analyzing a 100,000-word document is no different from analyzing a paragraph, and the text never leaves your machine.
Are "Word" and "word" counted as the same word?
By default, yes — counting is case-insensitive, so "The", "the" and "THE" merge into one row, which is what you want for almost all writing and SEO analysis. Enable the Case sensitive option when capitalization itself matters, such as distinguishing the name "Bill" from the noun "bill" or auditing brand-name capitalization. Note that different word forms are always counted separately: "run", "runs" and "running" are three entries, since the tool counts exact words rather than word stems.