Count Occurrences of a Word
Count how many times a word or phrase appears in your text.
How to use this tool
- Enter text and word or phrase to find in the fields above.
- Results update instantly as you type — or click Calculate.
- Read your occurrences and the full breakdown beneath it.
Count how many times a word or phrase appears in your text.
How it works
This tool counts how many times a specific word or phrase appears in a body of text. Enter the text in the first field and the word or phrase you want to count in the second field. The search is case-insensitive by default, so 'the', 'The', and 'THE' all contribute to the same count.
The count returned is the number of non-overlapping occurrences. This is useful for checking keyword density in an article, auditing how often a brand name appears in a document, verifying that a variable name is used a certain number of times in pasted code, or simply satisfying curiosity about a word in a long text.
The tool matches substrings, not whole words only — searching for 'cat' in 'concatenate' will count that occurrence. If you need whole-word matching, add a space on both sides of your search term to approximate it, noting that words at the start or end of a sentence may still be missed.
Worked example
Check keyword density for 'organic'
- Paste the 500-word article body into the Text field.
- Enter 'organic' in the Word or phrase field.
- The tool counts all case-insensitive matches.
- Read the count and divide by word count to get density percentage.
7 occurrences found
Common mistakes to avoid
- Searching for 'is' and getting inflated results because it matches inside words like 'this', 'his', 'island'.
- Forgetting that the count is case-insensitive — the result includes uppercase and lowercase variants.
- Using the count directly as keyword density without dividing by the total word count.
Key terms
- Occurrence
- A single instance of the search term found within the text.
- Substring match
- A match found anywhere within a word, not just as a standalone word. 'cat' matches inside 'category'.
- Keyword density
- The percentage of words in a text that are a target keyword; calculated as (occurrences / total words) x 100.
Frequently asked questions
- Is the search case-sensitive?
- Yes. For case-insensitive counting, convert both the text and search term to the same case before searching.