Hermetic Word Frequency Counter

This software scans a text or text-like file (including HTML and XML files), or text on the clipboard, and counts the number of occurrences of the different words (optionally ignoring common words such as the and this). It is possible to specify exactly what counts as a word (e.g., words with hyphens). The words which are found can be listed alphabetically or by frequency, with rank and frequency count displayed for each word.

There are two versions of this word count software: basic (WFC) and advanced (WFCA, which does everything that WFC does). The main differences are that WFC counts words only in single text and text-like files, whereas WFCA counts words in multiple files in a single operation and also counts specified phrases. If you need to count words in only one file at a time then WFC may be what you need. If you have many files, e.g. more than 20, or need more options and greater functionality, then you may need WFCA. Click on this link for the WFCA page.

There is theoretically no limit on the size of an input file or the number of words in a file.

The program counts the frequencies of all words in the file (or optionally all words other than common words). If you just want to count the occurrences of a single word (or of each word in a set of words, or of any word matching a given pattern) then you can do this with the Advanced Version of this program.

This software counts words in ANSI text and text-like files (including HTML and XML files). It does not act directly on MS-Word .doc files, which are binary files; such files can be scanned if saved as "Plain Text" files (see Scannable Files).

The 'rank' and 'frequency' values may each be included in, or excluded from, the displayed results.

What Counts as a Word?

This program is intended mainly for counting words in natural language text and in documents containing natural language text plus markup such as found in HTML and XML files. Thus there are some restrictions on which characters are admissible in words, and (for some characters) whether they may occur at the start or end of a word.

The word 'word' usually means a word in a natural language such as English or German, but for this software it has an extended meaning. A word is a sequence of characters bounded by spaces, but it is necessary to specify which characters exactly are admissible in words.

• In the basic (non-Advanced) version a word is any sequence of characters consisting of letters from a European language plus (optionally) hyphens (-), underscores (_), colons (:), periods (.), apostrophes ('), forward and backward slashes (/\), @-signs and numerals.
• In the Advanced Version a word may (optionally) in addition to these also include ampersands (&), commas and opening and closing parentheses, plus up to five user-specified characters (such as currency signs and asterisks).

The following characters are not admissible in words: plus signs (+), semicolons (;), double quotes (") and left and right angle-brackets (<>). In the Advanced Version the tilde (~) is also not permitted.

A word may begin or end with any alphabetic character and with any admissible non-alphabetic character (if such a character is allowed in the Settings window) except for a hyphen, an apostrophe, a period or a colon (and, in the Advanced Version, except for a comma or a parenthesis).

Periods and @-signs may (if allowed in the Settings window) occur within a word, thus allowing you to count email addresses. Allowing colons, forward slashes, hyphens, underscores and periods in a word allows you to count URLs.