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Word Extractor
Turn a text into a clean list of its words.
Quick Tool Overview
The Word Extractor turns a text into a clean word list in one pass — punctuation stripped, contractions and hyphenated compounds kept whole, duplicates optionally collapsed, and the result sorted however you need it.
- What it does
- Extracts a clean word list from text
- You give it
- A document, article or body of writing
- You get back
- A filtered, sorted word list
- Best for
- Vocabulary lists, word clouds and puzzles
About the Word Extractor
A word list is the starting point for a great deal of work: a spelling exercise, a vocabulary study, a search index, a word cloud, a puzzle. Producing one by hand means stripping punctuation, splitting, de-duplicating and sorting — four passes.
This does all four at once. Punctuation is removed, words are split on real boundaries so contractions and hyphenated compounds survive intact, duplicates can be collapsed, and the result can be sorted alphabetically, by length or by frequency. Filters let you keep only words of a certain length, words starting with a given letter, or words matching a pattern — which turns the tool into a quick way to answer "what long words does this document use?"
Key features of the Word Extractor
Contractions kept whole
"Don't" stays one word rather than becoming "don" and "t", neither of which is useful.
Length and pattern filters
Keep only words in a length range, starting with a letter, or matching a pattern.
Four sort orders
Original, alphabetical, by length or by frequency — each answering a different question.
Hyphen handling is a choice
Keep "state-of-the-art" whole, or split it, depending on what the list is for.
Frequencies on request
The list with counts alongside, which turns it into a concordance.
How to use the Word Extractor
-
1
Paste your text
A document, an article or any body of writing.
-
2
Set the filters
Minimum and maximum length, starting letter, or a pattern to match.
-
3
Choose the ordering
Original order, alphabetical, by length or by frequency.
-
4
Copy the list
One per line, comma separated, or with frequencies alongside.
Frequently asked questions
They stay whole. "Don't" is one word, not two, because splitting it produces "don" and "t", neither of which is useful in a word list.
"State-of-the-art" is kept as one word by default, since that is what it is. There is a switch to split on hyphens when you want the parts separately.
By default yes, since a standalone number is a token in the text. Switch them off when you want a purely alphabetic vocabulary list.
Yes. Keeping them gives you every word in order, which is what a tokeniser or a concordance needs. Removing them gives you the vocabulary, which is what a study list needs.
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