Free Word Frequency & Keyword Density Checker
Paste any text to see which words or phrases repeat most, with their count and percentage density.
Why "the" and "and" get filtered out by default
Linguists draw a distinction between "function words" — articles, prepositions, conjunctions like "the," "of," "and" — which carry grammatical structure but almost no topical meaning, and "content words" — nouns, verbs, adjectives — which actually convey what a piece of text is about. Function words are also, unsurprisingly, the most frequent words in virtually any English text regardless of subject, which means a raw, unfiltered frequency count is dominated by words that say nothing about the topic. The "exclude common words" option filters out exactly that closed set of function words (commonly called "stop words" in computational linguistics), so what surfaces instead are the genuinely topical, content-bearing words the text repeats.
What "n-gram" means
The "Group by" phrase-length options are built on a standard computational-linguistics concept: an n-gram is simply a contiguous sequence of n items from a text. A single word is a 1-gram (or "unigram"); "content marketing" is a 2-gram ("bigram"); "content marketing strategy" is a 3-gram ("trigram"). Analyzing 2- and 3-grams surfaces meaningful repeated phrases that single-word analysis can't see at all, since a phrase like "content marketing" might repeat often even if neither "content" nor "marketing" individually stands out.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is keyword density?
The percentage of your total word count made up by one specific word or phrase. If "coffee" appears 10 times in a 500-word article, its density is 2%.
Is there an ideal keyword density for SEO?
No fixed target — modern search engines evaluate topical relevance and context, not a magic percentage. This tool is more useful for spotting accidental over-repetition (which can read as keyword stuffing) than for hitting a specific number.
What does "exclude common words" do?
It filters out stop words — extremely frequent connector words like "the," "and," "is," and "a" — so the results surface the meaningful, topical words instead of words every piece of text contains.
What's the difference between single words and phrases?
Switching to 2-word or 3-word phrases groups consecutive words together (e.g. "content marketing" or "content marketing strategy"), which often reveals repeated multi-word keyword phrases that single-word analysis misses entirely.
What does "n-gram" actually mean?
It's a computational-linguistics term for a contiguous run of n items in a text. A single word is a 1-gram, a two-word phrase is a 2-gram, and so on — the "Group by" option here lets you switch between analyzing 1-, 2-, and 3-grams.
Why are common words like "the" and "and" excluded by default?
They're function words — grammatical connectors that appear extremely frequently in any English text regardless of topic, unlike content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) that actually reflect what the text is about. Filtering them out lets the genuinely topical, repeated words surface instead.