Phrase Frequency Counter
Find repeated phrases in your text and see how often they appear. Analyze 2-word, 3-word, and longer phrases, sort results, and download your phrase frequency table.
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Phrase Frequency Table
Showing phrases used at least twice. Change the minimum occurrences to include phrases that appear once.
| Phrase | Occurrences | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Type or paste text above to analyze phrase frequency. | ||
| Total | 0 | 0% |
|---|
How to Use the Phrase Frequency Counter
Paste or type your text into the box above. The Phrase Frequency Counter automatically identifies consecutive groups of words and counts how often each phrase appears.
Choose a Phrase length of two, three, four, or five words. You can also select All (2–5 Words) to analyze those lengths together. The default setting finds two-word phrases that appear at least twice.
Use Minimum occurrences to focus on repeated phrases or include phrases that appear only once. Sort by highest frequency, original order, lowest frequency, A-Z, or Z-A. Enable Count uppercase and lowercase separately if capitalization matters to your analysis.
What Is a Phrase Frequency Counter?
A phrase frequency counter measures how often combinations of consecutive words occur in a piece of text. Unlike a word frequency counter, which analyzes individual words, it identifies recurring multi-word sequences such as in the morning or the quick brown fox.
This makes it useful for spotting repeated wording in essays, articles, stories, transcripts, research documents, and other writing.
How to Find Repeated Phrases in Text
Set Minimum occurrences to 2 or More to show phrases that repeat. Choose a phrase length and look at the Occurrences column to see how many times each phrase appears. Use the highest-frequency sort option to place the most repeated phrases first.
Some repetition is intentional, especially for important terms, character names, and recurring concepts. The counter helps you find repetition so you can decide whether to keep or revise it.
How Is Phrase Frequency Calculated?
The counter moves through each sentence one word at a time, collecting consecutive groups of the selected length. For a two-word analysis, the words red fox runs produce the phrases red fox and fox runs.
The Percentage column compares a phrase's occurrence count with the total number of phrase occurrences for the selected length or lengths, before applying the minimum-occurrences display filter.
Because neighboring phrases can overlap, the total number of phrase occurrences is not the same as the number of words in the original text. If you filter out phrases used only once, the displayed percentages may add up to less than 100%.
Phrase Frequency Example
Consider the text: “Red fox runs. Red fox sleeps. Red fox eats.”
Using two-word phrases and ignoring capitalization, red fox appears three times. The other three two-word phrases each appear once. There are six total two-word phrase occurrences.
| Phrase | Occurrences | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| red fox | 3 | 50% |
| fox runs | 1 | 16.7% |
| fox sleeps | 1 | 16.7% |
| fox eats | 1 | 16.7% |
| Total | 6 | 100% |
With the default minimum of two occurrences, only red fox appears in the live table. Selecting 1 or More reveals the other phrases as well. Percentages in the example are rounded.
What Are Bigrams, Trigrams, and N-Grams?
A group of two consecutive words is called a bigram. A three-word group is a trigram. More generally, a sequence of a chosen number of words is called a word n-gram.
- 2-word phrases (bigrams): “blue sky”
- 3-word phrases (trigrams): “the blue sky”
- 4-word phrases: “look at the sky”
- 5-word phrases: “look up at the sky”
This tool counts word-based n-grams, not sequences of individual letters.
Overlapping Phrases and Sentence Boundaries
Overlapping phrases count separately. For example, very very very contains two occurrences of the two-word phrase very very.
The tool does not create phrases across sentence-ending punctuation or line breaks. Punctuation around words is not included in phrase matching, while common internal apostrophes and hyphens can remain part of a word.
Case-Sensitive and Case-Insensitive Phrase Counting
By default, phrases that differ only in capitalization are counted together, so New York and new york are treated as the same phrase. Select Count uppercase and lowercase separately to distinguish them.
Why Check for Repeated Phrases?
- Writing and editing: discover wording that appears too often.
- Content analysis: identify recurring expressions and terminology.
- Research: examine word combinations in transcripts, interviews, and documents.
- SEO writing: review repeated keyword phrases without treating a particular frequency as a ranking requirement.
- Data analysis: export occurrences and percentages for further review.
Download Phrase Frequency Results as CSV
Click Download as CSV to export the displayed phrase frequency results. The CSV includes each phrase, its number of occurrences, and its frequency percentage so you can work with the data in spreadsheet software.
Related Word and Text Tools
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Phrase Frequency Counter FAQ
What is phrase frequency?
Phrase frequency is the number of times a particular sequence of words occurs in a text. It can be expressed as an occurrence count or as a percentage of all analyzed phrase occurrences.
Can I count two-word and three-word phrases?
Yes. Choose two or three words in Phrase length, or select four, five, or all supported lengths.
Can I find phrases that appear only once?
Yes. Change Minimum occurrences to 1 or More to include one-time phrases.
Does the counter include overlapping phrases?
Yes. Overlapping sequences count as separate occurrences when they match the selected phrase length.
Does the counter count phrases across sentences?
No. Phrase matches stop at sentence boundaries and line breaks, so words from different sentences are not joined into one phrase.
Does capitalization affect the results?
Not by default. Turn on Count uppercase and lowercase separately to distinguish phrases by capitalization.
Can I download the phrase counts?
Yes. Select Download as CSV to save the phrase frequency table.
What is the difference between word frequency and phrase frequency?
Word frequency counts individual words. Phrase frequency counts sequences of two or more consecutive words. Use our Word Frequency Counter when you want one-word results.