Adverb Counter

How to use

1. 1Paste an essay, article, email, marketing page, or any block of writing into the input area. Click Load sample to see how the counter treats a paragraph that mixes adverbs and concrete verbs.
2. 2Read the density band at the top right: under 4% is lean prose, 4% to 8% is typical of well-edited writing, and over 8% reads heavy.
3. 3Scan the Most-used adverbs chip list to spot words you lean on. Adverbs tagged in rose are weak modifiers that are usually safe to cut.
4. 4Scroll the Highlighted preview to read each sentence in place. Amber underline marks an adverb; rose marks a weak adverb.
5. 5Use Only flagged sentences and Only weak adverbs to focus on the passages worth rewriting first.
6. 6Click Copy report to grab a plain-text summary you can paste into an editor's email, a code review, or a writing log. Click Clear text to start over.

About this tool

Adverb Counter scans any draft, article, email, or page of marketing copy for adverbs and shows them inline. It splits the input into sentences, tokenizes each one, and flags two kinds of adverbs from a single deterministic pass: -ly adverbs (slowly, quickly, surprisingly, carefully) and a curated list of common non -ly adverbs (very, often, always, never, here, almost, just, still, even, quite, somehow, nevertheless, instead). A second curated list of weak adverbs that Hemingway, Strunk and White, and similar style guides flag as almost always trimmable (very, really, actually, basically, literally, totally, simply, just, quite, definitely, certainly, obviously, clearly, suddenly, immediately, and many more) is highlighted in rose so the easiest wins stand out from the rest. The tool also computes an adverb density (adverbs divided by total words) and bands it into Lean (under 4 percent), Moderate (4 to 8 percent), or Heavy (over 8 percent) against the plain-language norm. A most-used-adverbs chip list surfaces the words you lean on so you can run a quick find-and-replace pass, and the per-sentence preview shows every match in place with one-click toggles for only flagged sentences and only weak adverbs. To keep false positives low, every -ly word is filtered against an adjective and noun blocklist (lovely, friendly, ugly, kindly, holy, silly, lively, costly, deadly, ally, fly, supply, comply, family, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, hourly, early, and others) and a vowel-in-stem check rules out short fragments. Useful for editors tightening landing pages, students cutting adverbs from essays, technical writers reviewing release notes, marketers running a brand-voice audit, novelists trimming first drafts, and anyone aiming for cleaner prose. This is a heuristic, not a part-of-speech tagger; unusual phrasing can still produce occasional misses or false positives. Treat each highlight as a suggestion to review, not a verdict. Everything runs locally in your browser, so the drafts, contracts, and unpublished copy you paste never reach a server. Pair this counter with the Passive Voice Checker for be-verb constructions, the Filler Word Counter for hedges and intensifiers, the Readability Score Checker for Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, and SMOG grade-level scoring, and the Word Counter for live word and reading-time stats.

Free to use. Works in your browser. No signup, no login.