Want to count the frequency of words in a Word document? Whether you're analyzing content, generating reports, or building a document tool, Python makes it easy to find how often a specific word appears—across the entire document, within specific sections, or even in individual paragraphs. In this guide, you’ll learn how to use Python to count word occurrences accurately and efficiently, helping you extract meaningful insights from your Word files without manual effort.

• Count Frequency of Words in an Entire Word Document
• Count Word Frequency by Section
• Count Word Frequency by Paragraph
• To Wrap Up
• FAQ

In this tutorial, we’ll use Spire.Doc for Python, a powerful and easy-to-use library for Word document processing. It supports a wide range of features like reading, editing, and analyzing DOCX files programmatically—without requiring Microsoft Office.

You can install it via pip:

pip install spire.doc

Let’s see how it works in practice, starting with counting word frequency in an entire Word document.

How to Count Frequency of Words in an Entire Word Document

Let’s start by learning how to count how many times a specific word or phrase appears in an entire Word document. This is a common task—imagine you need to check how often the word "contract" appears in a 50-page file.
With the FindAllString() method from Spire.Doc for Python, you can quickly search through the entire document and get an exact count in just a few lines of code—saving you both time and effort.

Steps to count the frequency of a word in the entire Word document:

• Create an object of Document class and read a source Word document.
• Specify the keyword to find.
• Find all occurrences of the keyword in the document using Document.FindAllString() method.
• Count the number of matches and print it out.

The following code shows how to count the frequency of the keyword "AI-Generated Art" in the entire Word document:

from spire.doc import *
from spire.doc.common import *

# Create a Document object
document = Document()

# Load a Word document
document.LoadFromFile("E:/Administrator/Python1/input/AI-Generated Art.docx")

# Customize the keyword to find
keyword = "AI-Generated Art"

# Find all matches (False: distinguish case; True: full text search)
textSelections = document.FindAllString(keyword, False, True)

# Count the number of matches
count = len(textSelections)

# Print the result
print(f'"{keyword}" appears {count} times in the entire document.')

# Close the document
document.Close()

How to Count Word Frequency by Section in a Word Document Using Python

A Word document is typically divided into multiple sections, each containing its own paragraphs, tables, and other elements. Sometimes, instead of counting a word's frequency across the entire document, you may want to know how often it appears in each section. To achieve this, we’ll loop through all the document sections and search for the target word within each one. Let’s see how to count word frequency by section using Python.

Steps to count the frequency of a word by section in Word documents:

• Create a Document object and load the Word file.
• Define the target keyword to search.
• Loop through all sections in the document. Within each section, loop through all paragraphs.
• Use regular expressions to count keyword occurrences.
• Accumulate and print the count for each section and the total count.

This code demonstrates how to count how many times "AI-Generated Art" appears in each section of a Word document:

import re
from spire.doc import *
from spire.doc.common import *

# Create a Document object and load a Word file
document = Document()
document.LoadFromFile("E:/Administrator/Python1/input/AI.docx")

# Specify the keyword
keyword = "AI-Generated Art"

# The total count of the keyword
total_count = 0

# Get all sections
sections = document.Sections

# Loop through each section
for i in range(sections.Count):
    section = sections.get_Item(i)
    paragraphs = section.Paragraphs

    section_count = 0  
    print(f"\n=== Section {i + 1} ===")

    # Loop through each paragraph in the section
    for j in range(paragraphs.Count):
        paragraph = paragraphs.get_Item(j)
        text = paragraph.Text

        # Find all matches using regular expressions
        count = len(re.findall(re.escape(keyword), text, flags=re.IGNORECASE))
        section_count += count
        total_count += count

    print(f'Total in Section {i + 1}: {section_count} time(s)')

print(f'\n=== Total occurrences in all sections: {total_count} ===')

# Close the document
document.Close()

How to Count Word Frequency by Paragraph in a Word Document

When it comes to tasks like sensitive word detection or content auditing, it's crucial to perform a more granular analysis of word frequency. In this section, you’ll learn how to count word frequency by paragraph in a Word document, which gives you deeper insight into how specific terms are distributed across your content. Let’s walk through the steps and see a code example in action.

Steps to count the frequency of words by paragraph in Word files:

• Instantiate a Document object and load a Word document from files.
• Specify the keyword to search for.
• Loop through each section and each paragraph in the document.
• Find and count the occurrence of the keyword using regular expressions.
• Print out the count for each paragraph where the keyword appears and the total number of occurrences.

Use the following code to calculate the frequency of "AI-Generated Art" by paragraphs in a Word document:

import re
from spire.doc import *
from spire.doc.common import *

# Create a Document object
document = Document()

# Load a Word document
document.LoadFromFile("E:/Administrator/Python1/input/AI.docx")

# Customize the keyword to find
keyword = "AI-Generated Art"

# Initialize variables
total_count = 0
paragraph_index = 1

# Loop through sections and paragraphs
sections = document.Sections
for i in range(sections.Count):
    section = sections.get_Item(i)
    paragraphs = section.Paragraphs
    for j in range(paragraphs.Count):
        paragraph = paragraphs.get_Item(j)
        text = paragraph.Text

        # Find all occurrences of the keyword while ignoring case
        count = len(re.findall(re.escape(keyword), text, flags=re.IGNORECASE))

        # Print the result
        if count > 0:
            print(f'Paragraph {paragraph_index}: "{keyword}" appears {count} time(s)')
            total_count += count
        paragraph_index += 1

# Print the total count
print(f'\nTotal occurrences in all paragraphs: {total_count}')
document.Close()

To Wrap Up

The guide demonstrates how to count the frequency of specific words across an entire Word document, by section, and by paragraph using Python. Whether you're analyzing long reports, filtering sensitive terms, or building smart document tools, automating the task with Spire.Doc for Python can save time and boost accuracy. Give them a try in your own projects and take full control of your Word document content.

FAQs about Counting the Frequency of Words

Q1: How to count the number of times a word appears in Word?

A: You can count word frequency in Word manually using the “Find” feature, or automatically using Python and libraries like Spire.Doc. This lets you scan the entire document or target specific sections or paragraphs.

Q2: Can I analyze word frequency across multiple Word files?

A: Yes. By combining a loop in Python to load multiple documents, you can apply the same word-count logic to each file and aggregate the results—ideal for batch processing or document audits.

Word documents often contain extensive text, and applying emphasis marks is an effective way to highlight key information. Whether you need to accentuate important terms or enhance text clarity with styled formatting, emphasis marks can make your content more readable and professional. Instead of manually adjusting formatting, this guide demonstrates how to use Spire.Doc for Python to efficiently apply emphasis to text in Word with Python, saving time while ensuring a polished document.

• Apply Emphasis Marks to First Matched Text
• Apply Emphasis Marks to All Matched Text
• Apply Emphasis Marks to Text with Regular Expression

Install Spire.Doc for Python

This scenario requires Spire.Doc for Python and plum-dispatch v1.7.4. They can be easily installed in your Windows through the following pip command.

pip install Spire.Doc

If you are unsure how to install, please refer to this tutorial: How to Install Spire.Doc for Python on Windows.

Apply Emphasis Marks to First Matched Text in Word Documents

When crafting a Word document, highlighting keywords or phrases can improve readability and draw attention to important information. With Spire.Doc's CharacterFormat.EmphasisMark property, you can easily apply emphasis marks to any text, ensuring clarity and consistency.

Steps to apply emphasis marks to the first matched text in a Word document:

• Create an object of the Document class.
• Load a source Word document from files using Document.LoadFromFile() method.
• Find the text that you want to emphasize with Document.FindString() method.
• Apply emphasis marks to the text through CharacterFormat.EmphasisMark property.
• Save the updated Word document using Document.SaveToFile() method.

Below is the code example showing how to emphasize the first matching text of "AI-Generated Art" in a Word document:

from spire.doc import *
from spire.doc.common import *

# Create a Document object
doc = Document()
doc.LoadFromFile("/AI-Generated Art.docx")

# Customize the text that you want to apply an emphasis mark to
matchingtext = doc.FindString("AI-Generated Art", True, True)

# Apply the emphasis mark to the matched text
matchingtext.GetAsOneRange().CharacterFormat.EmphasisMark = Emphasis.CommaAbove

# Save the document as a new one
doc.SaveToFile("/ApplyEmphasisMark_FirstMatch.docx", FileFormat.Docx2013)
doc.Close()

Apply Emphasis Marks to All Matched Text in Word Files

In the previous section, we demonstrated how to add an emphasis mark to the first matched text. Now, let's take it a step further—how can we emphasize all occurrences of a specific text? The solution is simple: use the Document.FindAllString() method to locate all matches and then apply emphasis marks using the CharacterFormat.EmphasisMark property. Below, you'll find detailed steps and code examples to guide you through the process.

Steps to apply emphasis marks to all matched text:

• Create an instance of Document class.
• Read a Word file through Document.LoadFromFile() method.
• Find all the matching text using Document.FindAllString() method.
• Loop through all occurrences and apply the emphasis effect to the text through  CharacterFormat.EmphasisMark property.
• Save the modified Word document through Document.SaveToFile() method.

The following code demonstrates how to apply emphasis to all occurrences of "AI-Generated Art" while ignoring case sensitivity:

from spire.doc import *
from spire.doc.common import *

# Create a Document object
doc = Document()
doc.LoadFromFile("/AI-Generated Art.docx")

# Customize the text that you want to apply an emphasis mark to
textselections = doc.FindAllString("AI-Generated Art", False, True)

# Loop through the text selections and apply the emphasis mark to the text
for textselection in textselections:
    textselection.GetAsOneRange().CharacterFormat.EmphasisMark = Emphasis.CircleAbove

# Save the document as a new one
doc.SaveToFile("/ApplyEmphasisMark_AllMatch.docx", FileFormat.Docx2013)
doc.Close()

Apply Emphasis Marks to Text in Word Documents with Regular Expression

Sometimes, the text you want to highlight may vary but follow a similar structure, such as email addresses, phone numbers, dates, or patterns like two to three words followed by special symbols (#, *, etc.). The best way to identify such text is by using regular expressions. Once located, you can apply emphasis marks using the same method. Let's go through the steps!

Steps to apply emphasis marks to text using regular expressions:

• Create a Document instance.
• Load a Word document from the local storage using Document.LoadFromFile() method.
• Find text that you want to emphasize with Document.FindAllPattern() method.
• Iterate through all occurrences and apply the emphasis effect to the text through  CharacterFormat.EmphasisMark property.
• Save the resulting Word file through Document.SaveToFile() method.

The code example below shows how to emphasize "AI" and the word after it in a Word document:

from spire.doc import *
from spire.doc.common import *

# Create a Document object
doc = Document()
doc.LoadFromFile("/AI-Generated Art.docx")

# Match "AI" and the next word using regular expression
pattern = Regex(r"AI\s+\w+")

# Find all matching text
textSelections = doc.FindAllPattern(pattern)

# Loop through all the matched text and apply an emphasis mark
for selection in textSelections:
    selection.GetAsOneRange().CharacterFormat.EmphasisMark = Emphasis.DotBelow

# Save the document as a new one
doc.SaveToFile("/ApplyEmphasisMark_Regex.docx", FileFormat.Docx2013)
doc.Close()

Get a Free License

To fully experience the capabilities of Spire.Doc for Python without any evaluation limitations, you can request a free 30-day trial license.