How to count word frequency in a document?

September 30, 2009 8:53 AM

Can anyone please suggest a program that can take a body of text from Word and calculate how frequent each word is used and then rank the citations from most-used- to least-used? Thank you.
posted by holdenjordahl to Technology (5 answers total)

Best answer: This site will do that.
posted by FairlyFarley at 9:02 AM on September 30, 2009

Best answer: This one will even make a nice word cloud out of whatever the most common words are.
posted by biffa at 9:07 AM on September 30, 2009

Best answer: I used odinsdream's site too, perfect for your job. We had an assignment in a poetry class to make some kind of homage to one of the authors we'd read that semester. I didn't like the authors we read, so instead I took his most famous four poems, put them into the parser, and then made each word proportionally large to its frequency (20 times = 20point, 5 times = 5pt, etc). Then by moving the words around a painting of his face, I could eventually create a portrait of the poet using his own words, and nothing else (and by using very rarely used words I could do it with some detail, too).

I always wanted to do something similar about Bush, inspired by this site.

Anyway, just a thought.
posted by omnigut at 9:10 AM on September 30, 2009

Response by poster: gosh, that was fast and useful. i couldn't think of a good way to google it. "parse" is a good word...
thanks, everyone!
posted by holdenjordahl at 9:19 AM on September 30, 2009

TextStat, TextAnz and Concordance are the best programs in this arena. [via MarkTAW.com
posted by Muffy at 8:33 AM on October 1, 2009