Word frequency query (NVivo 15 Windows)

Use Word Frequency queries to identify common words or themes in files; include stems, exclude stop words, view results as lists or word clouds.

Apr 1, 2026
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Word frequency query (NVivo 15 Windows)

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Text content language & stop words (NVivo 15 Windows)

Export query results (NVivo 15 Windows)

Manage query results (NVivo 15 Windows)

Word frequency query (NVivo 15 Windows)

Use word frequency queries to list the most frequently occurring words in your files.

You can use a word frequency query to:

Identify possible themes, particularly in the early stages of a project.
Analyze the most frequently used words in a particular demographic. For example, analyze the most common words used by farmers when discussing climate change. You could do a coding query to gather all content coded to climate change and to cases with the attribute farmer—then select the result code as the criteria for the word frequency query.
Look for exact words, or broaden your search to find the most frequently occurring concepts. For example, if you look for the most frequent words in a survey, you might find that water, health, and harmful are the most frequently occurring words. However, if you group similar words together, you might find that the concept of pollution (including pollutants, pollution, polluted, and pollutes) occurs most frequently.

Before you run a word frequency query, make sure the text content language is set to the language of your files Text content language & stop words (NVivo 15 Windows).

Create a word frequency query

If you are not familiar with NVivo queries the Query Wizard can help guide you. Note, however, that the Query Wizard does not include all the options for all queries.

Using the Wizard

On the Explore tab, click Query Wizard.

The Query Wizard opens:

Wizard step	Description
Choose the query you want to run.	Click Identify frequently occurring terms in content.
Specify the terms you want to search for.	In the Display words box, specify the number of words displayed in the results—for example, show only the top 20 words. In the Minimum word length box, type the number of characters of the smallest word you want to include. For example, a word length of 4 will exclude small words from the results. Select a Grouping option. Choose to find exact matches or group words with the same stem together—for example, you can search for sport and find sporting. You can adjust the slider to broaden your search to find similar concepts. For example, find sport, play and recreation.
Choose where you want to search.	Choose whether you want to search text in all your files, or restrict the search to selected items or folders.
Choose whether to add the query to your project.	You can run the query once or choose to add it to your project (and run it). If you choose to add it to your project, you must enter a name. You can optionally enter a description.

Click Run.

NOTE If you want to use word frequency query features that are not available in the wizard—for example, only count words in files created by specific users—you can add the query to your project and update it later.

Outside the Wizard

On the Explore tab, click Word Frequency.

Choose where you want to search for matching text:

Files & Externals—search for content in all the files and externals in your project
Selected Items—restrict your search to selected items (for example, a set containing interview transcripts)
Selected Folders—restrict your search to content in selected folders (for example, a folder of interview transcripts)

Specify how many words you want to display:
- <number> most frequent to include a specific number of words. For example, you could display the 100 most frequently occurring words.
- All to include all words found in the selected project items.
(Optional) Enter a minimum word length to exclude short words from the results—for example, enter 5 to display only words with five or more letters.
Select a Grouping option. Choose to find exact matches or group words with the same stem together—for example, search for sport and find sporting. You can adjust the slider to broaden your search to find similar concepts. For example, find sport, play and recreation.
Click the Run Query button at the top of Detail View.

When the query has finished running, the results are displayed as a temporary preview in Detail View.

NOTES

To save query settings so you can run a query again later, click Save Criteria. Name the query criteria file and optionally add a description. The file is saved under Queries / Query Criteria in the Navigation View.

View the results

When you run a word frequency query the results are displayed in the Detail View.

Click on the tabs displayed on the right to see different views of the results:

Summary Displays a list of the most frequently occurring words (excluding stop words).
Word Cloud Displays up to 100 words in varying font sizes, where frequently occurring words are in larger fonts.
Tree Map Displays up to 100 words as a series of rectangles, where frequently occurring words are in larger rectangles.
Cluster Analysis Displays up to 100 words as a dendrogram, where words that co-occur are clustered together.

What words are counted in a word frequency query?

Words containing punctuation (such as hyphens, periods and other symbols) are divided into separate words. For example, part-time will be counted as part and time.
Words containing apostrophes (such as o'clock and d'accord) are treated as one word but if the apostrophe is followed by an 's then the s is not included (Tom's would be counted as Tom).
In audio and video transcripts, only words in the Content field (column) are included in the query—any words in custom transcript fields are ignored.
In surveys, only words in codable fields (columns) are included in the query—any words in classifying fields are ignored.
When searching text in selected codes, if a word is coded against multiple codes, it is counted once for each code. Similarly, if a word has been coded by multiple users to the same code, it is counted once for each user.
Word frequency queries do not include 'stop words' Text content language & stop words (NVivo 15 Windows).
Word frequency queries do not search text within images. PDFs created by scanning paper documents may contain only images—each page is a single image. If you want to use word frequency queries to explore the text in these PDFs, then you should consider using optical character recognition (OCR) to convert the scanned images to text before you import the files into NVivo.
A word frequency query does not search text in framework matrix summaries.
If the text content language is Japanese, the 'base form' is listed in the query results, but the count includes any alternate forms of the word.

Exclude particular words

Word frequency queries do not include 'stop words'—by default, these are less significant words like conjunctions or prepositions, that may not be meaningful to your analysis.

Select the word you want to exclude then, on the Word Frequency Query tab, click Add to Stop Words List. The words you add to the stop word list will be excluded the next time you run the query.

You can view and edit the list of stop words. Text content language & stop words (NVivo 15 Windows)

NOTE In NVivo Collaboration Server projects, only project owners can add words to the stop word list.

Create a code to gather references

In the query results, select the word you want to use to create a code.
On the Word Frequency Query tab, click Create As Code.
Select a location and name the code.
Click OK.

Run a text search for a word

You can run text searches directly on words in the results of word frequency queries.

Select the word in the word frequency results.
On the Word Frequency Query tab, click Run Text Search Query.
(Optional) Change the Text Search Criteria or Query Options. Text search (NVivo 15 Windows)
Click Run.

NOTE

You can also double-click a word in the Word Cloud to run a text search.
If the text content language is Japanese, the text search will find all occurrences of the base form or any alternate forms of the word.

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NV15Win-Content-queries-word-frequency-query