Lexical Density Calculator
The share of a text's words that carry meaning, with the content and function words that produced it.
What is Lexical Density?
Lexical density is the proportion of words in a text that carry meaning, as opposed to the function words that hold the grammar together. Academic and technical writing typically runs at 40–50%; conversation, fiction and plain-language writing sit nearer 30–40%, because they lean on the same small set of pronouns, articles and prepositions. It is a measure of information packing rather than of quality — a high figure means the text is dense, which is a virtue in a reference work and a fault in a children's book.
How it works
Words are split by a stop-word list of about 170 common function words, and the content words that survive are divided by the total and reported as a percentage. That is a heuristic and the tool says so: nothing is tagged grammatically, so a listed word doing real work — “one” in a maths passage, “up” in a direction — is counted as a function word. Both sides of the split are listed with their frequencies, which is what makes the number checkable; and because the distortion is the same for both, comparing two drafts of the same passage is sound where comparing against a published figure is not.
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Examples
Realistic sample
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Common mistakes
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