Remove stop words
Strips common English filler words and leaves the words that carry meaning.
Paste your text and press the button to strip out the common English words — the, is, at, which, on, and the like — that appear in almost every sentence and carry little meaning on their own. What is left is the set of content words: the nouns, verbs and adjectives that actually say what the text is about. Spacing and line breaks are tidied so the result stays readable.
Runs entirely in your browser. Your text is never uploaded — open DevTools, Network tab, and you will see zero requests while you use this tool.
How to use it
- Paste your text into the box.
- Press "Remove stop words".
- Read off the content words that remain, or copy them for the next step.
- Use Undo if you want the original text back.
What a stop word is
Stop words are the high-frequency function words of a language — articles, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns and auxiliary verbs. In English that means words like "the", "a", "of", "to", "is", "and", "in", "it" and their relatives. They are essential for grammar but almost never distinctive: they appear so often, and in so many texts, that they tell you nothing about what a particular document is about.
This tool uses a standard English stop word list of roughly 170 words, close to the classic lists used by search engines and text-analysis libraries. Matching ignores case, so "The" and "the" are both removed.
When you need it
- Keyword and SEO analysis. Removing stop words before you count word frequency makes the meaningful terms rise to the top instead of "the" and "and" dominating every list.
- Text and data preparation. Search indexing, tag clouds, word clouds and many natural-language pipelines drop stop words as a first cleaning step.
- Summarising at a glance. Stripping filler words leaves a rough skeleton of a sentence or paragraph, which can help you see its core quickly.
- Study and language work. Isolating content words is a common exercise when analysing a text.
Examples
"The cat sat on the mat" becomes "cat sat mat". "This is a test of the system" becomes "test system". "I went to the shop, and it was closed" becomes "went shop, closed" — the comma and full stop stay in place, only the filler words go.
What it does and does not do
Removing stop words deliberately changes meaning: the result is not a grammatical sentence and is not meant to be read as one. It is a bag of content words for counting or scanning, not a rewrite. Note too that some stop words matter in context — "not" and "no" reverse meaning, and standard lists remove them — so never treat the stripped text as equivalent to the original. It is a lens, not a replacement.
Doing it without this tool
Python: the NLTK library ships a stop word list — nltk.corpus.stopwords.words("english") — and you filter your tokens against it. Powerful, but it is an install and a few lines of code for a one-off job.
Excel: there is no built-in stop word list, so people build a lookup table and a formula, which is fiddly and easy to get wrong around punctuation.
Find and replace: you can delete words one at a time in any editor, but with 170 words that is a long afternoon. A dedicated tool does the whole list in one pass.
Privacy: your text never leaves your browser
Everything on this page runs in your browser with JavaScript. The text you paste is never sent to a server, no account is required and nothing is stored anywhere. You can confirm it: open your browser developer tools, switch to the Network tab and use the tool — you will see zero requests go out. For anything sensitive, that is the whole point.
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Frequently asked questions
A standard English list of about 170 common function words — articles, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns and auxiliary verbs such as the, a, of, to, is, and, in and it.
Yes. They are on the standard stop word list, so they are removed. Because they reverse meaning, treat the stripped text as a word list for analysis, not as a summary of what the text says.
No. The and the are treated the same, so stop words are removed wherever they appear regardless of capitalisation.
No, and it is not meant to. Removing stop words leaves the content words for counting or scanning, not grammatical prose.
Yes, that is a common workflow. Strip the stop words here, then paste the result into the word frequency counter so the meaningful terms are not buried under the, and and of.
No. The filtering runs in your browser and the text never leaves your device.