Filler Word Counter

How to use

1. 1Paste your draft, article, email, or transcript into the input area. Click Load sample to try it on a deliberately filler-heavy paragraph first.
2. 2Watch the stat cards on the right: total words, total filler occurrences, filler density as a percent, and the words you would save by accepting the cleanup.
3. 3Toggle the seven categories (speech fillers, hedges, weak intensifiers, vague qualifiers, weasel words, cliches, redundancies) to focus on the habits you care about. Each category shows how many matches it contributed.
4. 4Add your own filler words to the custom box, one per line or comma-separated. Use it to target writing tics you know you have or domain-specific jargon.
5. 5Read the highlighted preview to see exactly where every filler lives, tagged by category color. Hover or focus a highlight to confirm the category.
6. 6Click Copy cleaned to grab the stripped version of your text, or Copy TSV under Top fillers to take the per-word counts to a spreadsheet.

About this tool

Filler Word Counter scans a draft, an email, a podcast or YouTube transcript, a speech outline, or any block of writing and tells you exactly how many filler words and weak phrases it contains, where they appear, and how to cut them. The tool ships with seven category dictionaries that cover the habits people actually search for: speech fillers (um, uh, er, ah, hmm, like, you know, I mean, well, so, basically), hedges (sort of, kind of, somewhat, maybe, perhaps, I think, in my opinion), weak intensifiers (very, really, quite, just, actually, basically, literally, totally, definitely, obviously), vague qualifiers (things, stuff, various, several, a number of, a lot of, a bunch of), weasel words (some say, many experts say, studies show, it is said, critics say), tired cliches (at the end of the day, think outside the box, low hanging fruit, moving forward, circle back, touch base, leverage, synergy), and redundancies (free gift, end result, past history, advance planning, exact same, very unique, completely surrounded, in order to). Each category can be toggled, and a custom-words box lets you add domain-specific filler (utilize, brand new, brand-new, in light of, going forward) or your own ticks from past edits. The matcher is unicode-aware, handles single-word and multi-word phrases, prefers the longest phrase when several patterns overlap (so you know what I mean beats you know), and respects sentence boundaries so multi-word fillers do not wrap across a period. Output is live and three-layered: a stat block (total words, filler occurrences, filler density as a percent of words, and how many words the cleanup would save), a color-coded highlighted preview of your original text with each filler underlined and tagged by category, a cleaned version of the text with every active filler stripped and surrounding whitespace collapsed (with a Copy cleaned button so you can drop the tighter version straight back into your draft), and a Top fillers table that ranks the actual entries that came up most often, with a Copy TSV button for taking the data to a spreadsheet. Useful for writers tightening a draft, editors reviewing a piece, public speakers preparing a talk, podcasters and YouTubers polishing transcripts before publishing or auto-captioning, students preparing essays, marketers writing concise web copy, and anyone who knows their first draft is full of fluff. Filler density above 5 percent is a sign of wordy writing, above 10 percent is a sign of fluff-heavy speech or a very early draft. Everything runs locally in your browser. The text you paste, the custom words you add, and the cleaned result never leave your device.

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