Word Frequency Calculator Information
Source Text
Copy some text from your word processor or other text application
and paste it into this box. Almost any character that is not a letter
or a numeral is considered a word separator so don't worry about the
formatting too much. Any terms that contain a numeral, a dollar sign,
an ampersand, or a number sign are not considered words and
will not be included in the keyword list. Hyphenated words are
considered two words. All words will be converted to lower
case before processing.
This tool is not intended to process very long source texts. The
actual length of text that you can process will be determined by your
browser. Source texts can be longer than the box, however.
(It has been tested with the text of this page, starting from the beginning
of this section to the end of the page.)
Word List
This will be the list of words and their frequency of appearance in
the source text, excluding words that are less than the minimum
number of letters and words that appear in the Words to Exclude
list.
Minimum Word Length
This sets the minimum length of a word to be included in the word
list. Shorter words will be excluded. If your source text contains
acronyms that must be included in the word list then you may need to
make this shorter rather than longer, in which case you may wish
to add more short words to the exclusion list. The default for this
is 3, which is why there are no 2 letter words in the default exclusion
list—none are necessary because they will be excluded anyway.
Words to Exclude
The list of words to exclude from the word list is arbitrary and
should be based on your knowledge of what's likely to be insignificant
in your source text. The default exclusion list is meant to be convenient, not
authoritative. If you use this tool many times and you need to modify
the exclusion list the same way each time you may want to keep
your own file of the exclusion list and paste it into this box at the
beginning of each session. Always enter exclusion words in lower case.
Accented Words
Words in the source text that contain accented letters will be included
in the word list as distinct words. An unaccented word that is spelled
the same except for the accent will be listed separately.
Note that some browsers may not display accented characters
properly in text boxes, displaying weird blocks or such instead.
There's a good chance that they will still process properly though,
and that your word list will look right once copied back into an
application that displays accented characters properly (Wordpad for
instance).
Support for accented characters assumes the ISO-8859-1/Latin-1
character set. Other character sets are not supported.
Copy and Paste
If you don't already know how to use the keyboard to perform Cut, Copy
and Paste functions then you should use Help or your operating system
manual to find out how. They are invaluable functions and are necessary
to use this tool. On a PC Copy is generally achieved by clicking and dragging
over text to highlight it then pressing Ctrl-C. This copies the text to the
system "clipboard" where it remains until you copy something else into
the clipboard. You Paste the contents of the clipboard into things by clicking
on the spot that you want the insertion to happen then pressing Ctrl-V. Pasting
doesn't empty the clipboard; you can paste the same thing many times into
many different applications if you like.
DISCLAIMER
No guarantee or warranty is made with respect to the operation,
quality or accuracy of this tool, the program embedded
in this page, or the information presented in this page. Use
of this tool, it's results, or this page in any way, is entirely at the
user's sole risk.