Every text has a fingerprint: the handful of words it cannot stop using. This counter finds them. Paste anything — an essay, an article, a speech, a product description — and it ranks every word by how often it appears, with counts and percentage shares, so the overused crutch word, the keyword you hoped was prominent, and the vocabulary you actually write with are all visible at a glance.
How words are counted
Text is lowercased first, so “The”, “the” and “THE” are the same word. A word is then a run of letters or digits, and an apostrophe inside a word does not split it — “don't” and “it's” each count once, as themselves. Everything else — spaces, commas, quotes, dashes — is a boundary. The table sorts by count, highest first, and breaks ties alphabetically so the order is stable and honest; the share column shows each word's slice of all the words counted. The minimum word length filter drops short words from the count entirely: set it to 3 or 4 and the “the”s and “and”s vanish, leaving the vocabulary that carries the meaning — the setting most people actually want once they see their first unfiltered table.
What frequencies tell you
Writers use the table as a mirror: the verb you lean on twenty times, the adjective that appears in every paragraph, the character name spelled two ways (each spelling counts separately — a free consistency check). Students and editors check that an essay's key terms really are its most frequent content words, and that no single word is doing suspicious amounts of work. SEO writers can verify a target phrase's presence without the superstition of a magic “density” — frequency shows prominence; it cannot tell you a page deserves to rank, and any tool that promises otherwise is selling the number, not the insight. Language learners get the highest-value vocabulary of any text for free: learn the top fifty words of the article and the next article gets easier.
Zipf's law, or why the top word always wins big
In almost any natural text, word frequency falls off in the same steep curve: the commonest word occurs roughly twice as often as the second, three times the third, and a small vocabulary does most of the work while thousands of words appear once. Your table will show it — a steep head and a long tail of single appearances. That tail is not failure; it is where precision lives. Worry instead about the middle: content words repeated just often enough to feel monotonous without ever being noticed.
Worked example
The sample sentence — “the cat sat on the mat the cat ran” — counts 9 words in total and 6 unique words. “The” leads with 3 appearances (33.3%), “cat” follows with 2, and sat, on, mat and ran appear once each. Set the minimum length to 2 and “on” drops out, leaving 8 counted words; the ranking reshuffles itself instantly.
How to use this tool
- Type or paste your text — the table rebuilds as you type.
- Read the totals: words counted, unique words, and the single most used word.
- Set a minimum word length of 3 or 4 to filter out short function words and see the real vocabulary.
- Scan the ranked table for words you overuse, spellings you vary, or key terms that are missing.
- Use Clear to wipe the box and analyse the next draft.
Frequency is not importance — and other cautions
A word can be frequent because it matters or because it is filler; “just”, “really” and “very” top many drafts' tables while meaning almost nothing, and the crucial term of an argument may appear only twice because synonyms carry it the rest of the way — synonyms, remember, count as separate words here, as they do in every honest counter. Read the table as a set of questions, not verdicts: why is this word here so often, where is the word I expected, and which of these repetitions would a reader feel? Then edit like a human, which is the part no counter can do for you.