The word frequency counter answers one question: how many times does each word appear in your text? You paste a passage into the textarea, click Analyze, and the tool lists every word it found with its count, sorted from most frequent to least, alongside a total word count and a unique word count. There is no settings screen and nothing to tune; the counting rules are fixed, and everything runs in your browser.
The Analyze button, not a live counter
The counter does not update while you type. The textarea waits for your text, and the counting starts only when you press Analyze. That matters for large documents: lowercasing, character cleanup, counting, and sorting all happen in a single pass on demand, so a long text is not reprocessed on every keystroke. A Clear button sits next to Analyze; pressing it empties the textarea and resets both counters to zero at the same time.
Only a-z and 0-9 survive the cleanup
Before anything is counted, the tool rewrites your text in two steps. First it lowercases everything, so The, THE and the become one word. Then it deletes every character that is not a letter from a to z or a digit from 0 to 9, so punctuation and anything outside the Latin alphabet simply fall out. The practical effects are worth knowing. The apostrophe in Don't disappears, so the contraction is counted as dont, and a word written with an apostrophe and the same word without it land in the same entry. An accented letter such as the é in café is removed rather than mapped, so the tool counts caf, not café. Digits, by contrast, are kept: a1 and b2 are legitimate words here, and the input a1 a1 b2 returns a1 twice and b2 once.
Whitespace is the word boundary
After the cleanup, what remains is split into words at runs of whitespace. A single space, a double space, a tab, and a newline all separate words the same way, so leading, trailing, and repeated internal spaces never produce empty words. Text that starts with two spaces, has three between the words, and ends with two counts as exactly two words. If the text is nothing but punctuation, the result is zero total words, zero unique words, and an empty table.
How ties are ordered
The table is sorted by count, highest first. When two words share a count, they keep the order in which they first appear in your text: the words enter the frequency map in reading order, and the sort is stable, so a tie never shuffles. For the input b a c b a c, all three words count twice, and the table shows b, then a, then c. Change the document and the tie order follows first appearances in the new text, not in the old one.
Total words and unique words
Above the table sit two numbers. Total words counts every occurrence, duplicates included: in the input the the the the the total is 4. Unique words counts the distinct entries in the table, which for that same input is 1. The gap between the two is a quick read on repetition. A document full of repeated terms, like meeting notes or a legal contract, shows a wide gap; a text whose vocabulary barely repeats shows a narrow one.
The table shows every word
There is no top-ten cut and no minimum count. If the text contains 3,000 distinct words, the table lists 3,000 rows, the words that occur once included. Long entries are truncated in the word column so the table stays readable, and each count sits in a small pill to the right of its word. For very long documents the list can be long, which is the point: nothing about your vocabulary is hidden by default, so the rarest word is one scroll away.
What the tool keeps, and where to go next
Everything runs client-side in your browser: the text is lowercased, cleaned, counted, and sorted in local memory, and nothing is sent to a server. Reloading the page clears the text and the results. For the shape of the text rather than its vocabulary, pair the counter with the Character Counter & Analyzer, which counts characters, words, sentences, and paragraphs and breaks the text into uppercase, lowercase, digits, and symbols; the Text Counter adds one-click case conversions on top of the same counts; and the Reading Time Calculator turns a word count into minutes. The how to use the reading time calculator post explains its five fixed speeds and the 60-second edge case in detail.