Word Frequency Analyzer
Count how often each word and character appears in any text. Three analysis tabs: word frequency, character frequency, and word length distribution. Sortable with CSV export.
The Word Frequency Analyzer is a free, browser-based tool that counts how often each word, character, and word length appears in any text. Paste an article, log file, dataset, or any text to instantly see a ranked frequency table with visual bars. All processing runs entirely in your browser.
Features
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Word frequency table | Ranked list of all words with count, percentage, and frequency bar |
| Character frequency table | How often each character (letters, digits, punctuation) appears |
| Word length distribution | Shows how many words are 1-letter, 2-letters, 3-letters, and so on |
| Sort options | Sort by frequency (default), alphabetically, or by word length |
| Case-sensitive mode | Toggle whether Apple and apple are counted separately |
| Stop word filter | Remove common English function words from the results |
| Minimum word length | Filter out very short words |
| Strip HTML | Removes tags before analysis for HTML documents |
| Export CSV | Copy the active tab's data as a CSV string for use in a spreadsheet |
| File support | Load .txt, .md, .html, or .csv files directly |
How to Use
- Paste text into the input area, or click Load file to upload a file.
- Set your options: result count, minimum word length, sort order, and toggles.
- Click Analyse.
- Switch between the Words, Characters, and Word lengths tabs.
- Click Export CSV to copy the current tab's data to your clipboard.
The Three Analysis Tabs
Words Tab
Shows every word that appears in the text, ranked by frequency. Each row displays:
- The word itself
- Its absolute count (number of occurrences)
- Its relative frequency as a percentage of total word count
- A proportional frequency bar
Use the Sort by dropdown to reorder results alphabetically or by word length. The Top results dropdown limits the table to the most frequent words.
Characters Tab
Shows the frequency of every non-whitespace character in the text. This includes letters, digits, punctuation, and symbols. Useful for:
- Identifying the letter distribution of a corpus for cryptography or linguistics
- Checking for unexpected characters in data files
- Analysing code or structured text for delimiter patterns
Word Lengths Tab
Shows the distribution of word lengths — how many 3-letter words, 4-letter words, and so on. Typical English prose has a large proportion of 3-5 letter words. A skew towards long words often correlates with lower readability scores.
Use Cases
Content Analysis
Identify overused words in an article or blog post. If your target keyword appears far less than filler words, consider restructuring the content.
Translation Memory and Localization
Frequency tables help translators and localisation engineers understand which terms recur most often, informing glossary creation and translation prioritisation.
Data Cleaning
Analysing character frequency in a CSV or log file can quickly reveal encoding problems, unexpected delimiters, or malformed entries.
Vocabulary Research
Build word lists for language learning materials by identifying which words appear most frequently in a given corpus.
Code Quality
Paste a code file to see which identifiers, keywords, or tokens repeat most. High repetition of certain patterns can indicate refactoring opportunities.
Cryptography and Cipher Analysis
Character frequency analysis is a classical technique for breaking simple substitution ciphers. English text has a characteristic letter distribution: e is typically the most frequent letter, followed by t, a, o, i, n.
Understanding Word Frequency vs. Keyword Density
Word frequency is a raw count — it tells you how many times each word appears. Keyword density adds context by expressing frequency as a percentage of total word count, which is more useful for SEO analysis. This tool focuses on frequency tables rather than SEO-specific metrics. Use the Keyword Density Checker if you need phrase-level density analysis for search optimisation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between the Words and Character tabs?
The Words tab shows frequency by whole words (delimited by spaces and punctuation). The Characters tab shows frequency by individual characters, including letters, digits, and symbols, ignoring whitespace.
Does the stop word filter work for languages other than English?
No. The stop word list covers common English function words only. Disable the filter when working with non-English text to avoid incorrectly filtering valid content words.
What happens if I enable case-sensitive mode?
Apple and apple are counted as separate words. In case-insensitive mode (the default), both are normalised to lowercase before counting.
What are "stop words"?
Stop words are very common words that carry little semantic meaning on their own — articles (a, the), prepositions (in, on, of), conjunctions (and, but), and pronouns (he, she, it). Filtering them out reveals the substantive vocabulary of the text.
How is the frequency percentage calculated?
For words: (word count / total word count) × 100. For characters: (character count / total non-whitespace characters) × 100. For word lengths: (words of this length / total words) × 100.
Can I export the results?
Yes. Click Export CSV to copy the active tab's data as a comma-separated values string. Paste it into a spreadsheet application to sort, filter, and chart the data.