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Lexical Density Calculator

Paste English text to measure its lexical density.

Result

66.67%
6
9

How it is calculated

The tool converts the text to lower case and splits it into words wherever it meets anything other than a letter, digit or apostrophe. Each word is then checked against a built-in list of about 120 common English function words (articles, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs such as is, have and would). Any word not on that list counts as a content word. Then density = content words ÷ total words × 100, shown to two decimals together with both counts. This is a word-list method, not grammatical tagging, so it cannot tell a noun from a verb. Numbers and contractions such as it's or don't are not on the list and count as content words. Text in other languages is judged against the English list. Empty text, or text with no words, returns no result.

Worked example

Take the sentence The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. It splits into 9 words: the, quick, brown, fox, jumps, over, the, lazy, dog. Three of them are on the function-word list: the, over and the. That leaves 6 content words: quick, brown, fox, jumps, lazy and dog. Density is 6 ÷ 9 × 100 = 66.67%. Adding more articles or prepositions to the same sentence would lower the figure, and replacing them with nouns or adjectives would raise it.

Try this example →

Common mistakes

  • Pasting text in another language; the French sentence Le chat est sur la table comes out at 100% because none of its words are on the English list.
  • Expecting contractions to be treated as function words: it's and don't count as content words, so a conversational text with many contractions scores higher than it should.
  • Leaving numbers, dates or page numbers in the pasted text; each one is counted as a content word.
  • Assuming the tool recognises nouns and verbs; a function word list cannot, and some words such as down or up are listed as function words even when they act as verbs or nouns.
  • Comparing percentages from very short samples; a ten-word sentence jumps by 10 points for each word changed, so use a longer passage.

About this calculator

Lexical density is the percentage of content words — nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs, which carry the core meaning of a sentence — relative to the total word count, as opposed to function words like articles, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions, which mainly serve grammatical structure. It's calculated as (content words / total words) × 100, following the widely used formula developed by linguist Jean Ure.

Linguists use lexical density to compare how information-dense written versus spoken language tends to be (written text typically scores higher), while ESL/EFL teachers and readability analysts use it to judge how demanding a passage is for a learner, since a high proportion of content words generally means more new vocabulary to process per sentence.

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Comments (1)

  • Editorial team

    Short passages swing widely. The sentence The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog scores 66.67%, but a few extra function words would move it a lot, so compare texts of similar length and kind. Because the list is English, a text in another language will look far more content-heavy than it is. Which sort of writing are you measuring, for example essays, speech transcripts, or textbook passages?

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