Unique Word Extractor
Paste a text and get each distinct word once, in alphabetical order, ready to use as a vocabulary list or keyword list. You can ignore capitalisation, show how often each word appears, hide short words, and copy the result one per line or comma-separated. Free, no sign-up, and nothing is uploaded.
Options
Turkish is the only language that cases the letter i differently: İ lowers to i, and i raises to İ.
How to Use the Unique Word Extractor
- Paste your text. An essay, a chapter, a transcript or a set of survey answers. The list updates as you type; there is no button to press.
- Choose the options. Case-insensitive is on by default, so "The" and "the" are one word and the list is lower case. Show counts adds (n) after each word. Min length hides words shorter than the number you set, from 1 to 20 characters.
- Pick the output format. One per line gives a column you can paste into a spreadsheet; Comma-separated gives a single line for a tag or keyword field.
- Copy the list. Total Words and Unique Words are shown above it, so you can see how much of the text was repeats.
What Counts as a Word
A word is a run of letters, digits and accent marks in any script, optionally joined by hyphens or apostrophes inside the word. So don't, well-known and dog's each stay whole, while commas, full stops, quotation marks and brackets around a word are discarded. Numbers count as words, which is useful for a list of the years or codes in a text, and a decimal such as 3.14 becomes two entries, 3 and 14.
The list is alphabetised ignoring capital letters, with numbers first (sorted as text, so 14 comes before 3) and then a to z. Different forms of one word — dog, dog's, dogs — are separate entries, because the tool compares spellings and does not reduce words to a root.
Other languages work too. Accented letters and non-Latin scripts stay inside their word, so "café au lait, naïve résumé" gives the entries au, café, lait, naïve and résumé. Languages written without spaces between words, such as Chinese and Japanese, come out as long runs rather than single words. The Turkish i rules switch only changes how capitals are lowered, and it is on automatically on the Turkish page.
A Worked Example
Take this 24-word sentence:
Input
The cat sat on the mat. The dog didn't sit on the mat; it was a well-known fact that the dog's bed was warm.
| Settings | Unique words | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Defaults (case-insensitive, min length 1) | 17 | a, bed, cat, didn't, dog, dog's, fact, it, mat, on, sat, sit, that, the, warm, was, well-known |
| Show counts, comma-separated | 17 | a (1), bed (1), cat (1), didn't (1), dog (1), dog's (1), fact (1), it (1), mat (2), on (2), sat (1), sit (1), that (1), the (5), warm (1), was (2), well-known (1) |
| Min length 4, comma-separated | 6 | didn't, dog's, fact, that, warm, well-known |
| Case-insensitive off, comma-separated | 18 | a, bed, cat, didn't, dog, dog's, fact, it, mat, on, sat, sit, that, The, the, warm, was, well-known |
The Total Words card stays at 24 in every row; Unique Words is what is left after case folding and the length filter. The 24 words reduce to 17 because the appears five times and mat, on and was twice. With the case option off, The and the become separate entries, which adds one. A minimum length of 4 removes every word under four characters, and it counts the apostrophe and hyphen, so didn't (6) and well-known (10) stay in.
What the List Is Good For
- Vocabulary lists. Extract the words of a reading passage, set a minimum length of 4 or 5 to skip the common short words, and you have a study list.
- Keyword checks. See which terms a draft actually uses before you compare it with a target list.
- Comparing two texts. Extract the words of each, then paste the two lists into the List Comparison Tool to see which words only one text uses.
- Cleaning a word list. Paste a messy list with repeats and punctuation and get back each word once.
Which Tool Do You Need?
| If you want… | Use |
|---|---|
| Each distinct word once, alphabetised | This page |
| Words ranked by how often they appear, with percentages and stop words hidden | Word Frequency Counter |
| To delete repeated words from your text and keep the rest | Duplicate Word Remover |
| To delete repeated lines from a list | Remove Duplicate Lines |
| The words two lists share | List Comparison Tool |
Frequently Asked Questions
- How do I get a list of unique words from a text?
- Paste the text into the box. The distinct words appear straight away in alphabetical order, one per line, with Total Words and Unique Words above them. Copy the list with the Copy button.
- What does the case-insensitive option do?
- When it is on, which is the default, "The" and "the" are one word and the output is lower case. Turn it off to keep capitalised and lower-case forms as separate entries in their original capitalisation, which is handy for spotting proper nouns.
- What is the minimum length setting for?
- It hides words shorter than the number you choose, from 1 to 20 characters. A setting of 4 or 5 removes most function words such as the, and, of and in, so what remains is closer to a vocabulary list. Unique Words counts only the words that pass the filter.
- Are words with apostrophes and hyphens kept whole?
- Yes. Contractions such as don't and hyphenated words such as well-known stay as single words. Punctuation at the edges of a word is dropped, and a possessive such as dog's is listed separately from dog.
- Do accented words and other scripts work?
- Yes. Letters with accents, such as the é in café, and words in Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic or Devanagari stay whole. Only languages that do not put spaces between words, such as Chinese and Japanese, are not split into separate words.
- Does it count how many times each word appears?
- Yes, switch on Show counts and each word is followed by its count in brackets. For a ranked table with percentages, use the Word Frequency Counter instead.
- Is my text uploaded?
- No. The extraction runs in your browser and the text is not sent or stored.