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Count Occurrences

Count how many times a word or phrase appears.

Free to use, no sign-up required. Count Occurrences is one of 198 tools built into Xenition, alongside a chat that can use them for you.

Counts how many times a word, phrase or character sequence appears in a text. Writers use it to spot overused words; others use it to check how often a keyword or name appears.

How to use Count Occurrences

1. Paste the text into the Text box.
2. Type the word or phrase in Find substring / word.
3. Leave whole word ticked to count standalone words, or untick it to count matches inside longer words too.
4. Tick case-insensitive to ignore capitalisation, then read the count.

How it works

With whole word on, a match only counts when the character before and after it is not a letter or digit in any script, so it works for non-Latin text too. With whole word off, the tool counts every non-overlapping appearance of the sequence. Case-insensitive lowercases both the text and the search term before comparing.

Example

In “In the inn, Ina sat in the corner. IN.”, searching in gives 1 as a whole word, 3 as a whole word with case-insensitive on, 2 as a substring, and 5 as a substring with case-insensitive on.

Questions about Count Occurrences

Why is my substring count lower than I expected for repeated letters?

Matches do not overlap. Searching aa in aaaa gives 2, because the second match starts after the first one ends.

Does whole word treat hyphens and apostrophes as word boundaries?

Yes. Only letters and digits count as part of a word, so in is found as a whole word in “in-house”.

Use it from chat

You do not have to open Count Occurrences to use it. Ask Xenition in plain language and it runs the right tool, then carries the answer into whatever you are working on — a document, a spreadsheet, a deck.

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