Hermetic Word Frequency Counter

Setting the Operation Parameters

The concept of counting words may seem simple, but is not. What is a word? Is double-click one word or two? Is don't a word? Is cat the same word as Cat? Do you want to count all words? Including common words such as this, with and him? This program allows you to customize its operation so that just the words are counted in which you are interested, and, as noted above, words may (if you wish) include hyphens, apostrophes, etc.

Here is a screenshot of the page for customizing the operation of the software:

In the Advanced Version of this software the 'Settings' window has more options, as shown here.

'Words' with only 1 or 2 characters are automatically ignored.

If you wish to preserve capitalization in the results (so that e.g. 'Introduction' is counted separately from 'introduction') then check the 'Upper/lower case significant' checkbox.

Checking the 'Convert plural words to singular form' checkbox will cause all plural words to be converted to singular (e.g., sensibilities to sensibility) and the counts of both forms will be given next to the singular form. This will also convert most 3rd person singular verbs to 1st person singular (e.g., reads to read).

If you are counting words in a file which consists of mixed English and Chinese text (rather unlikely, of course) then check the 'Allow only 7-bit ASCII characters' checkbox (so that the Chinese characters are ignored). This should also be done for any file which contains non-ASCII characters which you wish to ignore.

Parameters set using this screen may be saved at any time (using the Save state button on the main screen) so as to be restored on the next run.

You can also save a set of parameters to a parameter file (which must have extension .wfc, or .wfca in the Advanced Version), and reload it later. This allows you to keep several different parameter sets at hand for working with different kinds of files (e.g., text in different languages).

The Reinitialize button sets all parameters back to the way they were when the program was first run.

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