How do I find the most common words in a text?
Paste the text and read the table. The tool splits your text into words, lower-cases them, counts each distinct word and sorts the list from the most frequent to the least. Each row shows the count and the percentage of the total, so "clear: 3 (21.4%)" means "clear" is about a fifth of all words.
What are stop words?
Stop words are very common function words such as "the", "of", "and", "to" and "is". They appear in nearly every English text, so they usually crowd the top of the list without telling you anything about your topic. The built-in list for English has 50 such words. Hide them to see the content words, or show them to see the raw count.
Reading the results
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Word | A distinct word, converted to lower case |
| Count | How many times it appears |
| Percent | Count divided by all words, including hidden stop words |
The totals above the table show how many words the text has and how many are distinct. The table lists up to 150 rows.
What the tool does not do
It counts single words. It does not group word forms (so "write", "writes" and "writing" are separate rows), it does not count two- or three-word phrases, and it does not judge whether a word is a keyword. The English stop-word list is short, so some filler words may still appear. For deeper analysis you will need linguistic software, but for editing and quick checks it is enough.
Using frequency to improve your writing
- Look for the top content words and ask whether each deserves that weight.
- Replace repeated vague words ("thing", "good", "very") with specific ones.
- If a word you meant to emphasise is missing from the top of the list, your message may be unclear.
- Do not stuff a keyword just to move it up the list. Search engines reward clear writing for readers, not repetition.
For length and reading time, use the Word & Character Counter and the Reading & Speaking Time Calculator. To vary repeated words, try the Paraphrasing Tool or the Synonym Finder.