PowerShell: Count Word Frequency

Count word occurrences in a text file with a single PowerShell pipeline:

(Get-Content .\words.txt) -Split '\W+' | Group-Object | Sort-Object -Descending Count | Select-Object Count, Name

Example output:

Count Name
----- ----
   12 the
    9 a
    7 to
    5 PowerShell
    3 file

How It Works

Get-Content .\words.txt Reads the file as an array of lines.

-Split '\W+' Splits each line on one or more non-word characters (\W+ matches spaces, punctuation, newlines, etc.), producing an array of individual words.

Group-Object Groups identical words together. Each group has a Count and a Name (the word itself). Matching is case-insensitive by default.

Sort-Object -Descending Count Sorts groups from highest count to lowest.

Select-Object Count, Name Outputs just the count and word columns, in that order.

Case-Sensitive Counting

By default Group-Object treats The and the as the same word. To distinguish them:

(Get-Content .\words.txt) -Split '\W+' | Group-Object -CaseSensitive | Sort-Object -Descending Count | Select-Object Count, Name

Skip Blank Entries

Splitting on whitespace can produce empty strings at line boundaries. Filter them out with Where-Object:

(Get-Content .\words.txt) -Split '\W+' | Where-Object { $_ } | Group-Object | Sort-Object -Descending Count | Select-Object Count, Name

Where-Object { $_ } drops any empty or whitespace-only string.

Top N Words

Pipe to Select-Object with -First to limit results:

(Get-Content .\words.txt) -Split '\W+' | Where-Object { $_ } | Group-Object | Sort-Object -Descending Count | Select-Object -First 10 Count, Name

Count Words from Any String

The same pipeline works on any string — not just files. Pipe from the clipboard, a variable, or command output:

# From a variable
$text = "to be or not to be that is the question"
$text -Split '\W+' | Group-Object | Sort-Object -Descending Count | Select-Object Count, Name

Output:

Count Name
----- ----
    2 to
    2 be
    1 or
    1 not
    1 that
    1 is
    1 the
    1 question