I am pleased to announce our new tool for writers called Words Counted. Words Counted allows you to see which words you use most frequently within your writing.

It will show you your top ten most commonly used words, ten least used words, and a chart of word sizes. After the chart, all your words are listed in descending order of frequency.

Why?

It all started when someone posted in a writer’s group wanting to find a tool that gives you how often you have used different words. I realised that I could write one. So I did.

How?

Computers are very good with repetitive tasks. Counting words is very repetitive and ideal as a task that computers are good at. Even so, dealing with human language and punctuation presented a few challenges.

The first version struggled with contractions but within a day, I had solved that problem.

I used a list of common stop-words. Stop-words are words so common to the language that they would otherwise dominate the list without giving useful information. Words like “they”, “will”, “this”, and so forth. You can tell Words Counted to keep those words in if you want them.

I would be happy to create stop-words lists for other languages if someone who knows another language is willing to make one for me. Text file, one word per line.

I also skipped words shorter than three letters to speed things up and because very short words tend to belong as stop-words. You cannot skip this currently.

Safe and easy to use

Words Counted is easy to use – you simply paste the text you want to analyse into the box and press the button. After a short wait, your results will appear.

Your text will not be saved, stored, shared, or used. Once Words Counted has made the page of results for you, it instantly forgets what it saw.

For more information check About: Words Counted.

Try Words Counted for yourself.