Card catalog · 3 x 5 cards · one drawer
Word Frequency Counter
Paste a text and every distinct word gets a catalog card with its count. The cards riffle into rank order as you type; guide cards mark the top ten and the rest.
What the cards tell you
Each card is one word: how many times it appears and what share of the text it takes. The top ten sit behind the first guide card. In ordinary English the little grammatical words always win, so the "drop common words" option removes about a hundred of them (the, of, and, to, a, in, is, it, that, was, and so on) and lets the words that carry the meaning come to the front. Min length hides short tokens such as numbers or initials.
Lexical density
The figure under the drawer is the share of distinct words: 100 unique words in 400 is a density of 25 per cent. Low density means repetition, which is what you want in a chorus and not in an essay; high density means variety. Compare two drafts by pasting each in turn.
Why a card catalog
Before search boxes, a library's index was a cabinet of drawers full of 3 by 5 inch cards, one card per entry, held on a brass rod through the hole at the bottom so nobody could walk off with one, with tabbed guide cards to jump to a section. A word count is the same object: one card per word, filed in order, with the count typed on the card.
How are words split?
On anything that is not a letter, digit or apostrophe, so "don't" stays whole and hyphenated words are counted as their parts. Accented letters are kept, and case is folded unless you untick "ignore case".
Can I get the full table?
Choose All and then Copy as CSV: word, count and percentage for every card, ready for a spreadsheet.
Is anything uploaded?
No. The drawer is in your browser and nothing you paste leaves it.