Online Tool Store
Frequency Word List Builder
Turn a text into a frequency-ordered word list with stopwords handled, for language learning, corpus work, and content analysis.
🔒 This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your files are never uploaded to a server.
Education
Frequency Word List Builder
Frontend preview — no upload or external service.
Frequency list
48,000 words, 6,200 unique. After stopwords: the top 200 words cover 61% of remaining tokens, and 3,100 words appear exactly once.
How the Frequency Word List Builder works
- Paste a text large enough to be representative — a single article gives a list about that article, not the language.
- Remove stopwords for vocabulary work; keep them for stylistic analysis.
- Read the coverage figure: the top few hundred words usually account for most of the text, which is what makes frequency-ordered learning efficient.
The method
Word frequencies follow a steep distribution: a small number of words account for a large share of any text, and most words appear once or twice.
the nth most common word appears roughly proportionally to 1/n — Zipf's law
This is why the first thousand words of a language carry so much of everyday comprehension, and why the next thousand add far less.
FAQ
Why learn vocabulary by frequency?
Because coverage rises steeply at first. The most common few hundred words appear constantly, so learning them delivers comprehension faster than learning words in alphabetical or thematic order.
Should inflections be grouped?
For vocabulary learning, yes — "run", "runs" and "running" are one item to learn. For stylistic analysis, keep them separate, since the choice between forms is part of what you are measuring.
How much text do I need?
Enough to be representative of what you want to read. A single novel gives you that author's vocabulary; a mixed corpus gives you something closer to the language.
How we compare
| Feature | Online Tool Store | Pen and paper | A classroom platform |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coverage percentages | ✓ | Manual | Yes |
| Inflection grouping | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Text stays on your device | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| No corpus subscription | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
Frequency Word List Builder reports coverage, not just counts, because coverage is what tells you when learning more words stops paying off.