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Word/Character Frequency Counter
Frequency analysis of text: how many times each word or character appears, sorted by count.
This tool counts how many times each word or character appears in a text and sorts the result by count — something that's practically impossible to tally by hand in a long piece of text.
How to use it
- Choose what to analyze — words or individual characters.
- Paste text and a frequency table appears instantly, sorted from most to least common.
- Handy for instantly spotting the most common word or character in a large block of text.
Common uses
- Finding keywords in an article or document for a basic SEO check without dedicated tools.
- A teaching example of frequency analysis when learning cryptography basics or natural language processing.
- Checking a text for excessive repetition of certain words before publishing.
Things to keep in mind
Frequency analysis is case-sensitive by default in many implementations — "Word" and "word" can count as different entries unless the text is normalized to one case first.
Classical substitution ciphers (ROT13, the Caesar cipher) don't change the frequency distribution of letters, only the mapping — which is exactly why frequency analysis is the classic way to break them without trying every key.
Article about this tool: Text frequency analysis: why count how often words repeat
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between Words and Characters mode?
Words mode counts how many times each word appears in the text, while Characters mode counts the occurrence of each individual character, including punctuation.
What do the "Case-insensitive" and "Ignore spaces" options do?
"Case-insensitive" merges occurrences that only differ by upper/lower case, and "Ignore spaces" excludes spaces from the count in character mode; results are then sorted by descending occurrence count.
Is the analyzed text sent to a server?
No, frequency analysis runs entirely in your browser in JavaScript — nothing is transmitted online.
What is Zipf's law?
In natural languages, a word's frequency is inversely proportional to its frequency rank: the most common word occurs roughly twice as often as the second most common, three times as often as the third, and so on. A significant deviation from this pattern is a signal that the text may be artificially generated or keyword-stuffed spam.
Can frequency analysis be used to break a simple cipher?
Yes, for classical substitution ciphers (like ROT13 or the Caesar cipher), which don't change the frequency distribution of letters — they just rearrange the mapping. By comparing the frequency distribution of the ciphertext to the known distribution of the original language, you can recover the character mapping without trying every possible key.