About this tool
Word Frequency Counter
Word Frequency Analyzer ranks the most common words in a block of text, with optional stop word removal, case folding, and a configurable list length. Results export to CSV.
How to use it
- Paste your text.
- Turn on Remove stop words to hide the, and, of and their kin.
- Set case-insensitive if The and the should count together.
- Choose how many results to show, and export to CSV if you need them elsewhere.
Why stop words matter
Without filtering, the top of any English frequency list is always the same: the, of, and, to, a. Those function words carry grammar rather than meaning, so they tell you nothing about the text.
Removing them surfaces the words that actually characterise the document. That is the same first step used in search indexing and text classification, for exactly the same reason.
When it helps
- Finding the words you overuse in your own writing.
- Pulling likely keywords out of a document.
- Comparing two pieces of writing by their vocabulary.
- Checking whether an article actually covers the topic it claims to.
Common mistakes
- Reading frequency as importance. A word repeated because of a formatting quirk will top the list without meaning anything.
- Leaving case sensitivity on when you did not mean to, which splits The and the into two entries.
- Removing stop words when studying writing style. For that question the function words are the interesting part.
