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So in my first book I discovered that once I latch onto a word that I liked I sometimes tended to overuse it. I had a hard time finding anything on the web to help me manage this situation so I wrote something myself and I'm making it available for others to use on my website.

It's available on my website at

It not only counts word frequency (which is configurable in terms of words to ignore and minimum count to see in results) it also counts what I call 'hotspots' which are places where a word shows up more than 3 times in close proximity.

This application is ENTIRELY written in javascript and has no contact with any server, so your content never leaves your machine. This means that no one is seeing your content, or the results of the analysis.

You can easily see the javascript via your web browser and capture it and have it evaluated to convince yourself I am being truthful--I would want to be extremely careful with my content as well.

While I encourage you to use it via my website, he entire thing is on an MIT license, meaning you can do what you want with it. I will be exposing the source code publicly on github in the near future. That link will be available on the page once I get it established. If you're a code monkey like me feel free to engage it as open source (fork and pull requests, issues, etc)

If you decide to host it yourself, I'd appreciate a mention and link to my website. If you make changes, I'd love to know what they are.

If you find issues, enhancement ideas or confusion please let me know via email at [email protected]

J.D. wrote: "So in my first book I discovered that once I latch onto a word that I liked I sometimes tended to overuse it. I had a hard time finding anything on the web to help me manage this situation so I wro..."

That sounds cool J.D. Can't wait to get home and give it a shot.

That's cool! I am uber guilty of the hotspots and having characters who seem to be in a perpetual state of huffing and sighing. :)

Mine are always frowning at something someone said. "He/she frowned." I usually clean all that out in the edits, though.

I have this sneaking suspicion that I could edit my manuscripts 100x and still find things I want to change every time through. The tool helps me to turn this into a diagnostic step rather than another opportunity to do a huge rewrite :)

Ken wrote: "Mine are always frowning at something someone said. "He/she frowned." I usually clean all that out in the edits, though."

I used to play MUDs back in the 90s and have that problem too.

Wow, this is awesome, JD. I think we all are guilty to have favorite darling words that we need to kill every once in a while. Mine are definitely smile/frown/look. *sigh* ;-)

A.E. wrote: "I think we all are guilty to have favorite darling words that we need to kill every once in a while. "

I'm curious what mine are. Can't wait to get home and find out. *glances at the clock* Ten hours down, eighteen to go...

I'm betting my darling words are "coddlepocks" and "swiggledown". I use them way too much. But, doesn't everyone?

No, like most everyone, I'm guessing it's like "smirked", "smiled", "frowned", "winced" and so on.

Good gravy, Dwayne! Twenty eight hour shifts???

Christina wrote: "Good gravy, Dwayne! Twenty eight hour shifts???"

Yeah, luckily this wasn't one of those seventy-two hour shift weekends.

I found that all my characters were smiling WAY too much :) they're much more stoic now.

Apparently mine grin and smirk. This could turn obsessive. :)

Thesaurus.com is my best friend, no doubt about it. :-)

Hmm...It detects hotspots but gives no way to find where they are in the text, which makes the tool seem of limited use.

Most of my repeated words were the main character names and words like "had" "what" "that" and other common ones. Didn't notice any words that really bothered me.

But still, without knowing where the clusters happen, I'd find it a real slog to make corrections based on this.

noting the locations of the hotspots is something I've been working on. it's a tricky proposition as I'd really only be able to note it in terms of word counts. Without some understanding of manuscript structure that's about as fine grained as it can be.

Also, while at the end of my "process" I'll dump the whole manuscript in and see what it shows me, I also use it during revisions on single chapters at a time. Makes it a lot easier to find the offending sections.

I used the f word like 70 times.

Charles wrote: "I used the f word like 70 times."

Seriously?! How many times can you describe something as "F"reudian?

Looking forward to giving this tool a spin. Thanks for creating this JD.

J.D. wrote: "So in my first book I discovered that once I latch onto a word that I liked I sometimes tended to overuse it. I had a hard time finding anything on the web to help me manage this situation so I wro..."

That sounds like an amazing tool and I would love to hear more about it. [email protected] I know my major hotspot is using she and her too much in a first person narrative. I had an editor but it didn't seem to bother them. I am still trying to include my book on Good Reads and may be a few days yet.

Interesting. What's the word limit for this tool?

@Owen: it's configurable. I have it defaulting to 5 but when I do my entire manuscript at once I usually raise that a bit. You can also add words that you want to ignore (for example, if you know you use 'bombastic' a lot but have decided that's okay you can have the application not count it or display results.)

Charles wrote: "I used the f word like 70 times."

Why do you write about frogs so much?

Dwayne wrote: "Charles wrote: "I used the f word like 70 times."

Why do you write about frogs so much?"

Isn't Charles a French name?

J.D. wrote: "@Owen: it's configurable..."

I think Owen meant the word count of the text you put in. I put in about 75,000 words and it ran pretty quickly.

J.D. wrote: "@Owen: it's configurable. I have it defaulting to 5 but when I do my entire manuscript at once I usually raise that a bit. You can also add words that you want to ignore (for example, if you know y..."

Micah is correct -- I meant word count on the text input. I was having trouble getting results for anything over 2-3000 words. It could be this machine. Firefox gets weird sometimes.

New novel...

45 f**k
14 f**ked
39 f**king
48 sh*t
8 bullsh*t
13 Jesus
5 damn
36 hell
6 a*s
11 a-hole
6 b**tard
16 b*tch (probably in the "son of a" kind)
=======
247 invectives
74,791 words
0.33% invectives

;D

Micah wrote: "New novel...

45 f**k
14 f**ked
39 f**king
48 sh*t
8 bullsh*t
13 Jesus
5 damn
36 hell
6 a*s
11 a-hole
6 b**tard
16 b*tch (probably in the "son of a" kind)
=======
247 invectives
74,791 words
0.33% ..."

You sure hit that asterisk key a lot.

Owen wrote: "Micah is correct -- I meant word count on the text input. I was having trouble getting results for anything over 2-3000 words. It could be this machine. Firefox gets weird sometimes."

Ah, sorry about that. So I've run it a bunch with around 120k words and it's been fairly performant. I run it in Chrome. do you get some kind of javascript error when you run into this?

I really appreciate all the feedback--it's always a challenge to QA your own code.

BTW, I ran it on Chrome as well.

Dwayne wrote: "You sure hit that asterisk key a lot."

I know. I get a lot of grief about that from the anti-asterisk social warriors out there. **sigh** (oops, did it again!)

Micah wrote: "I know. I get a lot of grief about that from the anti-asterisk social warriors out there. **sigh** (oops, did it again!)"

U* w**h asks; l*** **r s*m*-**lo** too!

J.D. wrote: "do you get some kind of javascript error when you run into this?"

Nothing Firefox reports (ver 34.0.5). The debugger came up with nothing. The script is merely unresponsive. (When I dump in 75K words, I don't see any hit at all on the CPU -- not sure if I should.) The upper limit seems to be ~4K words. There's no evidence it's even recognizing the input, once it exceeds that. The only thing that's interesting there is that the limit might be ~32,000 characters. I wonder if FF limits the input to a script?

Anyway, I wouldn't worry about it. This version and/or installation of Firefox does lots of screwy things.

Next time I play with the script I'll test it in firefox. :)

Good catch, though. thanks for taking a look at it!

I just wanted to dump this link to the repository for anyone that is interested in seeing, using or participating in that. It's on bitbucket.org, not github.com:

I've pinned this as it is a great resource for authors. Thanks, JD!

Thanks :) I'm glad people find it helpful

J.D. wrote: "So in my first book I discovered that once I latch onto a word that I liked I sometimes tended to overuse it. I had a hard time finding anything on the web to help me manage this situation so I wro..."

I'm home. It's... way too much fun, J.D. I will probably never be able to write again. I will spend all my free time playing with this!

It doesn't seem to work well on Firefox, but it works fine on Chrome. (I think I saw a comment from Owen or Micah saying this while I was at work, but I just wanted to back it up).

I'm really glad you're enjoying it :)

Christina wrote: "That's cool! I am uber guilty of the hotspots and having characters who seem to be in a perpetual state of huffing and sighing. :)"

There's a lot of "yelling" in my book. Hey, people yelled a lot, what can I say.

Sherri wrote: "Hey, people yelled a lot, what can I say."

Loud things? ;)

J.D. wrote: "I'm really glad you're enjoying it :)"

I am. And the number one word I use a lot is... "said". No matter what story I put through your machine, "said" is, by far, the most used word. I am surprised I didn't expect that, but with my tales being so dialogue heavy, it makes a lot of sense.

Dwayne wrote: "I am. And the number one word I use a lot is... "said". No matter what story I put through your machine, "said" is, by far, the most used word. ..."

Interesting fact Dwayne: In my novel the word 'said' is never actually said. *gasp!*

CB wrote: "Dwayne wrote: "I am. And the number one word I use a lot is... "said". No matter what story I put through your machine, "said" is, by far, the most used word. ..."

Interesting fact Dwayne: In my n..."

Or so he said...

I will double check Riley, it might have snuck in there somewhere since the last time I looked and therefore must be deleted.

I hope it isn't, Said was one of the flag words that wasn't allowed to be in there! :)
I do appear to have a serious problem with the phrase 'text box' though... that shows up like 3000 times!

@Riley: Well played, sir. Well played...

CB wrote: "I hope it isn't, Said was one of the flag words that wasn't allowed to be in there..."

Hmm. You know, you might want to consider putting some dialog. [joke]

Why, oh why, would "said" be a flag word?

For those who were wondering, these are the words that are in the built in word exclusion list:

this.excludes = ["is", "it", "in", "the", "and", "a", "to", "but", "not", "or", "of", "at", "with", "was", "i", "she", "her", "my", "that", "on", "me", "for", "into", "out", "were", "you", "he", "me", "his", "on", "for", "him", "out", "we", "up"]

I just grew that little list while using and developing the tool--it doesn't reflect some attempt at a grand bit of universal knowledge :)

You can choose not to use this list by unchecking that checkbox in the configuration section at the top.

Even if you like this list as excludes, you probably have others you want to exclude--you can add those in the first text field.

Micah wrote: "Why, oh why, would "said" be a flag word"

Normally 'said' wouldn't be a flag word. I am actually quite a fan of said!

However, my novel is set inside a multi-player video game. No one actually talks as they are technically typing in what they say, and then are reading the 'Text Box' entries of others. No one ever says something like 'Oh, but you said that thing and...', they would instead type "Oh, but I just read what you typed and...'

It eliminated all instances of 'said', 'say', 'and that ilk'. The characters show emotion mostly through what they actually type, but can do special yelling, whisper, and interruption typing actions to balance it out and keep it from getting stale. :) It reads a lot like a play.

Normally I wouldn't restrict words like that, but it was to serve the narrative as a whole and keep the story feeling like a video game.

I also restricted most real life time references, measurements, and various other things that reminded the reader and characters that the real world does exist outside the game they are playing. I exchanged them to video game terms to keep it feeling internally consistent with the world.

It was actually very fun!

J.D. wrote: "So in my first book I discovered that once I latch onto a word that I liked I sometimes tended to overuse it. I had a hard time finding anything on the web to help me manage this situation so I wro..."

J.D. - Thanks for sharing this word frequency tool. What a great resource. Guilty as charged on overusing the same word. "Paused" seems to be my favorite word. Who knew?

My pleasure. I'm glad you're finding it useful