What to use it for
Spot words you overuse in an essay, check keyword usage in a web page or product description, or compare the vocabulary of two drafts.
Common words
Words like “the”, “and”, and “of” usually top the list. Turn on “Hide common words” to focus on the words that carry meaning.
Reading the results
In almost any English text, a handful of small words dominate. In the Brown Corpus, a classic million-word sample of written American English, “the” alone made up about 7% of all words. That pattern, where a few words are very common and most are rare, is known as Zipf’s law. Hide common words to see past them to the vocabulary that defines your text.
Ideas for writers and marketers
Writers can catch crutch words such as “just”, “really”, and “very”. Students can check they aren’t repeating the same term in every paragraph. For a web page, the list shows whether the topic you want to be found for actually appears, but there is no ideal keyword percentage: write naturally for readers, which is what search engines reward.