Lexical Density Calculator

Measure the ratio of content words to function words to assess text complexity and information density.

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How it works

Lexical density measures what proportion of the words in a text carry meaning (content words) versus those that serve a grammatical purpose (function words). A higher lexical density indicates more information-packed text.

• Content words: nouns, main verbs, adjectives, and adverbs — they carry the core meaning of a sentence (e.g., "scientist", "discovered", "ancient", "carefully").
• Function words: articles, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, and determiners — they provide grammatical structure (e.g., "the", "of", "and", "is", "she").
• Formula: lexical density = (content words ÷ total words) × 100%.
• Typical ranges: spoken language tends to have 40–50% lexical density, while written text ranges from 50–60%. Academic and technical writing often exceeds 60%.
• Classification: the tool uses a comprehensive list of English function words to classify each token. Any word not recognized as a function word is treated as a content word.

All processing runs entirely in your browser — no data is sent to any server.

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