Weasel Wordsmith

Help

The tools on this website require you to paste a body of text into a web form. When designing the site, I imagined that the pasted text would comprise a short story or an article--maybe a poem. Other text would work, of course. But that's the imagined use case.

If you paste text longer than 30,000 characters, the site will complain and ask you to submit something shorter. Please break long documents into shorter bits.

Weasel Words Finder

The weasel words finder ignores case in its counting. It also ignores punctuation. Keep that in mind when reading its output. The output consists of an accounting of which weasel words you used, and how often you used them. You can click expand on each weasel word in the report to see the sentences in which that word appeared in your story.

As mentioned in the about document, the tool cuts a few corners during its counting. This reduces the compute power (and the time) needed to do the counting. In a few rare cases, these simplifications could lead the results to be off by one or two. But the results should always be very close to correct.

Word Stats

The stats tool has nothing to do with weasel words. It just gives you a list of words you used in your story, in decreasing order of frequency. Along with each word and its frequency, you can expand the entries to see each word in context. This can be useful to see if you are repeating words too much.

Like the weasel words too, the stats tool ignores capitalization and punctuation.

One important thing to note: we omit accounting for words that only appear once in your story. These aren't very interesting from a statistical perspective, and omitting them greatly reduces how much data we need to send over the internet.

Latinate Words

Latinate words (i.e. words that arrived in English from Latin roots) tend to sound stuffy and overwrought. On the other hand, words with Germanic origins are often punchy and vital. Think of the difference between adolescence and youth, or dimunutive versus small. The latinate words tool scans your text and offers (usually) Germanic alternatives to the latinate words you used. There is nothing inherently wrong with latinate words, but sometimes swapping old for antedeluvian makes a big difference.

Obviously, our latinate word tool only tracks a tiny number of latinate words. Please feel free to send additions to the email address at the bottom of this page.