Synonym Replacement Tool

The word frequency allows you to know if you abuse certain words, and gives you the opportunity to replace them. Poor vocabulary identifies children, users of English as a Second Language, and scarcely educated people.

Word Frequency is also a way to identify typos that do not appear in Spelling checkers. For instance, if you write a word with one different spelling, like Harrison and Harison, you will spot it when you see the Word Frequency output. Person names do not show up in spelling checkers.

Another example are words in foreign languages (paraguero and paragüero), or words with English and American spelling: centre and center.

Word Frequency is used in Stylistic Analysis. For instance, a writer from the nineteen century would use word frequencies completely different from a contemporary. Men and women are also associated with different word use.

Word Frequency Analyisis as a means to improve writing quality

This article was originally published in our Algo Cracking and Domain Growing blog.

Back in the 1980s there was a "Word Frequency" tool in the MS Word distribution package. As someone who writes English as a second language I used it heavily, because it helped me to improve my vocabulary and to correct misspellings.

You never notice how you abuse words, until you run Word Frequency.

A list of all the words in a document, ordered by frequency, makes it easy to detect overuse and/or abuse of a certain word or expression. The less used words were also of help, because sometimes I wrote Thomson instead of Thompson, car instead of cart, or similar errors that the spelling checker bypasses.

Frequency analysis can also be used as a means to establish the 'signature' of a certain author, the cultural level of the writer, its use of slang or technical vocabulary, and other writing features. Frequency analysis can accuse some writers to have the vocabulary of a 11-year-old.

Word Frequency is part of the Synonymizer Text Tools Package 3.0. It is used to know which words could use synonyms.

See an example of Word Frequency screenshot.