Unique words in a text

What it's for

It gives the list of the different words in a text, each one once and in alphabetical order. It helps whoever is learning a language and wants the vocabulary of an article, whoever writes and wants to see how many different words they're really using, and whoever is putting together a list of terms for a glossary or an index.

How it counts

A word is a run of letters only, accents included, and it's compared in lowercase: «House» and «house» are the same word and appear once. Digits and punctuation don't make it into the list, so «12» and «3.50» stay out.

Mind the apostrophe, which isn't a letter: «don't» becomes two entries, «don» and «t». In English that's worth knowing before you count; in Italian, where «dell'anno» splits into «dell» and «anno», it's almost always what you want, because «dell» isn't a word to study.

Different forms stay different words

The count is on written words, not on meanings: «cat» and «cats» are two entries, as are «go» and «went». Bringing them all back to a base form would mean knowing the grammar of every language, and irregular verbs would make it approximate anyway: better an honest list than one that's silently wrong.

Nearby tools

If besides the different words you need how many times each one appears, the page is Word frequency. For the total of words, characters and sentences there is Word counter, and to sort all the words keeping duplicates Sort the words. If the text is long and you want to know whether it reads easily, that count is done by How readable is a text.