What are the most common English words?

The most frequent English words are: the (7%), of (3.5%), and (3%), a (2%), in (2%), is (1%). These are filtered as stop words by default.

Can I use this for SEO keyword density?

Yes. Turn off stop words filter and look at the % of text column. 1-3% keyword density is natural; above 5% may be seen as keyword stuffing.

Word Frequency Counter

Analyze how often each word appears in your text, sorted by frequency.

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Filter common words (the, and, is…) Case-sensitive

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What Is Word Frequency Analysis?

Word frequency analysis counts how many times each distinct word appears in a text, then ranks them from most common to least. This reveals the text's vocabulary density, keyword focus, and stylistic patterns. It's used in linguistics, SEO content analysis, plagiarism detection, and natural language processing.

Uses for Word Frequency Analysis

Use Case	What to Look For
SEO content auditing	Are your target keywords appearing enough times?
Academic writing	Overused words that weaken your writing
Plagiarism detection	Unusual word patterns compared to a reference
Style analysis	Author fingerprinting and vocabulary richness
Readability improvement	Find repetitive words to replace with synonyms
Language learning	Identify most important words to study in a text

What Are Stop Words?

Stop words are extremely common words — "the", "a", "and", "in", "is", "it", "of" — that appear in almost every text. They're usually filtered out in analysis because they carry little semantic meaning and would dominate the frequency count. Toggle the filter above to include or exclude them.

Vocabulary Richness (Type-Token Ratio)

A common measure of vocabulary richness is the Type-Token Ratio (TTR): unique words ÷ total words × 100%. A higher TTR indicates richer, more varied vocabulary. Literary fiction typically has a TTR of 40–60%, while simple conversational text may be 20–30%. Professional academic writing often scores above 50%.

Frequently Asked Questions

The most frequent English words are: "the" (7% of all words), "of" (3.5%), "and" (3%), "a" (2%), "in" (2%), "is" (1%), "it", "you", "that", "was". These are filtered as stop words by default.

A typical novel uses 10,000–20,000 unique words. Shakespeare's complete works contain about 31,000 unique words. The average adult native speaker uses around 20,000–35,000 words in active vocabulary.

Yes. Turn off the stop words filter and look at the "% of text" column. A keyword density of 1–3% is generally considered natural. Above 5% may look like keyword stuffing to search engines.