Word Frequency Analysis: Find Overused Words in Any Text
How counting word frequency helps you spot repetition, check keyword density, and tighten your writing — with a free browser tool.
Every writer has a crutch word. Mine, for a long time, was “actually” — I once found it eleven times in a 900-word article and had no memory of typing it even once. You don’t notice your own repetition while writing because your brain autocompletes right past it. A frequency count notices for you.
The Word Frequency Counter takes any text you paste and returns a table of every word, sorted by how many times it appears, with a percentage of the total. That’s the whole tool. What you do with the table depends on why you opened it.
Editing your own writing
Sort a 1,500-word draft by frequency and the top of the list is predictable: the, a, to, of. Skip those. The interesting part starts around position ten, where content words show up. If “solution” appears 14 times in a product page, your reader felt every one of them.
A rough rule I use: any content word above 1% of the total deserves a look. That’s one occurrence per hundred words — often fine, sometimes a tic. The percentage column in the tool makes this a five-second check.
Set the minimum word length to 4 or 5 to hide most function words and get straight to the vocabulary that carries meaning.
Checking keyword density for SEO
Keyword density — the share of your text taken up by a target keyword — used to be gamed hard. In 2005 people wrote pages where the keyword was 8% of the text, and it ranked. Google’s Panda update killed that in 2011, and today stuffing hurts more than it helps.
Density still matters as a sanity check, though, in both directions:
- If your target keyword sits at 4% or more, the page probably reads like it was written for a robot. Rewrite.
- If it appears once in 2,000 words, search engines may not connect the page to the query at all.
Most SEO writers aim somewhere between 0.5% and 2%. There’s no magic number, but the counter tells you where you stand instead of leaving you to guess.
Analysing texts you didn’t write
Frequency analysis is older than SEO by a few centuries. Scholars have used it to argue about who wrote which Shakespeare play, and stylometry — attribution by word-usage patterns — helped unmask J.K. Rowling as the author behind the pseudonym Robert Galbraith in 2013. Function-word frequencies turn out to be a fingerprint: nobody uses “upon” at quite the same rate as anyone else.
You probably aren’t unmasking novelists, but the same idea works at smaller scale. Students use frequency tables to study vocabulary in a foreign-language text before reading it. Teachers run essays through a counter to see whether a student’s vocabulary suddenly changed between assignments. Researchers use it as the first step of content analysis: count first, interpret after.
What the counter treats as a word
Any run of letters or digits counts, so “don’t” and “well-known” each register as one word rather than fragments. Punctuation is stripped. Cyrillic, accented characters, and CJK text all work, because the tool splits on Unicode categories rather than assuming English.
Case sensitivity is off by default — “The” and “the” merge — but you can flip it on when capitalization matters, like counting proper nouns separately from common ones.
Everything runs in your browser. The text never touches a server, so pasting an unpublished manuscript or a confidential report is safe.
Paste something into the Word Frequency Counter and check the top of your own list — you already have a crutch word, you just haven’t met it yet.