Find Words You're Overusing
Every writer leans on a handful of favorite words without noticing. This tool builds a frequency count of every word in your text and surfaces the ones you've reached for the most, so you can catch the repetition before a reader does.
Paste in a draft — an essay, a blog post, an email, a report — and scan the ranked list on the right. It updates as you type, so you can trim a sentence and immediately see the count drop.
How is a "word" counted?
Text is split on whitespace, and each piece has its surrounding sentence punctuation — periods, commas, exclamation points, question marks, semicolons, colons, and parentheses — trimmed off before counting. Counting is case-insensitive, so "Fox", "fox", and "FOX" all add to the same tally, shown in lowercase. Hyphenated words and contractions are counted as a single word each — "co-op" and "don't" are their own entries, distinct from "co" or "don." Pieces of text made up only of digits, like a bare page number, aren't counted as words at all.
What does "Minimum Repetitions" control?
Only words that show up at least this many times make it onto the list — the default is 3, so the occasional repeated word won't clutter the results. Raise it to focus on your most glaring repeats, or lower it (down to 2) to catch anything that shows up more than once.
What does "Exclude Stop Words" do?
Turn this on to hide common connector words — things like "the," "and," "a," "is," and "with" — from the results. These words repeat constantly in any piece of writing simply because English requires them, so filtering them out lets you focus on the more meaningful words you're overusing instead.
Why does repetition matter?
A word that shows up constantly draws attention to itself and can make writing feel flat or mechanical, especially in shorter pieces where every word carries more weight. Spotting the pattern is the first step — once you know "however" shows up six times in three paragraphs, you can decide which instances actually need to stay.
What should I use instead of a repeated word?
Once you've found an overused word, swap some of its instances for a synonym or rework the sentence so it isn't needed at all. If you want a complete breakdown of every word in your text rather than just the repeated ones, the word frequency counter shows the full picture.
Related tools
- Word Frequency Counter — see a full breakdown of every word, not just the repeated ones.
- Duplicate Line Remover — remove repeated lines instead of repeated words.
- Find and Replace Text — swap out an overused word across your whole document.
- Online Sentence Counter — check sentence-level structure alongside word repetition.
Last reviewed: August 2026