Unique Word Counter
Count unique and distinct words in any text instantly. See the top most-frequent words ranked by occurrence, get a full deduplicated word list, and measure your text's lexical diversity — free, private, and no signup required.
Why Use Our Unique Word Counter?
Instant Real-Time Analysis
Unique word count, frequency rankings, and the full deduplicated word list update live as you type — no button to press, no delay.
Ranked Word Frequency Table
See the top 10, 20, 50, or 100 most-used words ranked by occurrence count with percentage frequency and a visual frequency bar for each word.
100% Private — No Upload
All analysis happens locally in your browser. Your text never leaves your device. No account, no tracking, no data stored anywhere.
Case Sensitivity Control
Toggle case-sensitive mode to treat "Hello" and "hello" as the same word or as distinct words — essential for code analysis and proper noun tracking.
Common Use Cases for the Unique Word Counter
Vocabulary Richness Analysis
Measure the lexical diversity of your writing. A high uniqueness ratio signals varied vocabulary — essential for academic writing, literary analysis, and professional content.
SEO Keyword Density Audit
Identify overused keywords in your content. If a target keyword appears too frequently, it can trigger keyword stuffing penalties — use the frequency table to find the right balance.
Academic & Essay Writing
Check for repetitive word use in essays and dissertations. Professors and editors flag overused words — spot them instantly and replace with synonyms before submission.
Language Learning & Vocabulary Building
Paste a foreign-language text to extract all unique words for study. Build vocabulary lists from real-world content like articles, books, and subtitles.
Code & Documentation Review
Analyze variable names, function names, and comments in source code. Find inconsistent naming conventions and overused identifiers across large codebases.
Content & Corpus Analysis
Researchers and data scientists use unique word counters to analyze text corpora, compare writing styles, and build word frequency datasets for NLP projects.
Understanding Unique Word Counting
What Is a Unique Word Counter?
A unique word counter counts the number of distinctwords in a text, as opposed to the total word count. For example, the sentence "the cat sat on the mat" has 6 total words but only 5 unique words — "the" appears twice. The ratio of unique words to total words is called the Type-Token Ratio (TTR) or uniqueness ratio, and it is a standard measure of lexical diversity in linguistics and computational text analysis.
How Our Unique Word Counter Works
The tool processes your text entirely in your browser using three steps:
- Tokenization:Your text is split into word tokens using a regex that matches sequences of word characters, apostrophes, and hyphens — so "don't" and "well-known" each count as one word.
- Frequency mapping:Each token is inserted into a frequency map. With case-insensitive mode (default), "Hello" and "hello" are merged into the same entry. With case-sensitive mode, they are counted separately.
- Ranking & output: The frequency map is sorted by count (descending) to produce the top-N table, and sorted alphabetically to produce the deduplicated word list.
What Gets Counted as a Word?
The unique word counter uses the following rules:
- Contractions:"don't", "it's", and "they're" each count as one word.
- Hyphenated words:"well-known" and "state-of-the-art" each count as one word.
- Numbers:Numeric tokens like "2024" and "3.14" are counted as words.
- Punctuation: Standalone punctuation marks (commas, periods, brackets) are not counted as words.
What Is a Good Uniqueness Ratio?
For general English prose, a uniqueness ratio of 40–60%is typical for longer texts (articles, essays). Short texts naturally have higher ratios because function words like "the", "and", and "is" haven't had enough repetitions to pull the ratio down. Academic writing tends to score higher (more varied vocabulary), while conversational text scores lower. A ratio below 30% may indicate repetitive writing or keyword stuffing.
Related Text Tools
Word Counter & Reading Time
Count words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs. Get estimated reading time at 200, 250, and 300 WPM.
Character Counter with Platform Limits
Count characters with color-coded limit bars for Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more.
Reading Level Analyzer
Get Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog, SMOG, and Coleman-Liau scores.
Speaking Time Estimator
Estimate how long it takes to deliver a speech at slow, average, and fast speaking speeds.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Unique Word Counter
A unique word counter counts the number of distinct words in a text, ignoring repetitions. For example, if "the" appears 50 times in your text, it counts as just one unique word. The tool also shows how often each word appears, giving you a complete word frequency breakdown.
Total words is the raw count of every word token in your text, including repetitions. Unique words counts only distinct words — each word counted once regardless of how many times it appears. The ratio between them (uniqueness ratio) measures lexical diversity.
The uniqueness ratio (also called Type-Token Ratio or TTR) is the percentage of your total words that are unique. A ratio of 50% means half of all word occurrences are words that appear only once. Higher ratios indicate more varied vocabulary. Short texts naturally have higher ratios than long texts.
Completely. All analysis happens locally in your browser using JavaScript. Your text is never uploaded to any server, never stored, and never transmitted anywhere. When you close the tab, the text is gone. This tool works entirely offline once the page has loaded.
In case-insensitive mode (the default), "Hello", "hello", and "HELLO" are all counted as the same word. In case-sensitive mode, they are counted as three separate unique words. Use case-insensitive mode for general writing analysis and case-sensitive mode when analyzing source code or proper nouns.
Contractions like "don't", "it's", and "they're" are counted as single words. Hyphenated words like "well-known" and "state-of-the-art" are also counted as single words. Standalone punctuation marks (commas, periods, brackets) are not counted as words.
Yes. Paste your article or web page content and look at the top words table. If your target keyword appears with a very high frequency percentage (above 3–5% for most keywords), it may be flagged as keyword stuffing by search engines. The frequency percentage column shows exactly how often each word appears relative to the total word count.
There is no hard limit — the tool processes everything locally in your browser, so the only constraint is your device's available memory. In practice, texts up to several hundred thousand words process instantly. Very large texts (millions of words) may take a second or two.
Yes. Click "Copy Word List" to copy all unique words (sorted A–Z, one per line) to your clipboard. You can then paste them into any text editor, spreadsheet, or document. The list is formatted with one word per line for easy import into Excel, Google Sheets, or NLP tools.