Free Basic Tone Detector
Explore formal, informal, positive and negative English word cues with negation handling and transparent evidence. Review, copy or download your report. No signup required.
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How to explore basic English tone and sentiment cues
Inspect positive, negative, formal and informal word cues locally. Review negation, custom dictionaries and highlighted evidence without an AI request.
- Paste or import an English passage of up to 20,000 characters.
- Choose approximate negation handling and whether to ignore quoted text. Optionally add single-word positive or negative cues.
- Review the polarity and register labels, then filter the highlighted evidence by cue type.
- Compare sentence-level net cue counts and copy or download the report. Read the limitations before interpreting the result.
Where a word-cue tone check helps
Before you send a customer reply, a complaint follow-up or a team announcement, it can help to see which words carry emotional weight. This detector does not guess intent. It shows exactly which words in your text match its positive, negative, formal and informal lists, so you can decide whether the balance fits your purpose.
Support teams can use it to spot a reply that leans on words like problem, difficult and broken. Students can check whether an essay slips into casual words such as gonna, kinda or okay. Writers of product copy can see at a glance whether the friendly words they meant to include actually appear.
Because every match is highlighted, the result is easy to explain to a colleague. You are not trusting a hidden score.
Worked example with the sample passage
Take this text: Thank you for the helpful feedback. However, the broken link is frustrating. We are not happy with the delay. With negation turned on, the tool finds 2 positive cues, 3 negative cues, 1 formal cue and 0 informal cues.
The positive cues are thank and helpful. The negative cues are broken, frustrating and happy. Happy counts as negative because not appears within the three words before it, which flips its polarity. However is the single formal cue. The labels read More negative cues and More formal cues.
The sentence rows show net counts of plus 2 for the first sentence, minus 2 for the second and minus 1 for the third. Each net count is positive matches minus negative matches in that sentence, so the whole passage nets minus 1.
How the counting works
The built-in lists are short. The positive list has about twenty words such as good, reliable and fantastic, and the negative list has about twenty such as poor, annoying and painful. The formal list includes therefore, moreover and sincerely. The informal list includes hey, yeah and lol, and any contraction ending in n't, 're, 've, 'll or 'm also counts as informal.
Negation checks the three words before a cue for words like not, never, no, hardly, don't or won't. A comma, semicolon, colon or dash between them breaks the link. You can add up to 300 single words per polarity list, but the same word cannot sit in both lists.
All of this happens in your browser. Text up to 20,000 characters is analyzed as you type, and the highlights update immediately when you change an option or add a custom word.
Common mistakes to avoid
Do not read a count as a verdict on how the reader will feel. A short, polite message with one negative word can show More negative cues even when its overall effect is kind. Look at the highlights and the sentence rows, not just the label.
Watch for double negatives and figures of speech. In The update isn't bad at all, bad is flipped to a positive cue and isn't counts as informal, which may or may not match your reading. Turn on Ignore quoted text when you quote a customer, so their words do not count as your tone.
Useful tips and limitations
- Cue counts are not probabilities, confidence levels or a psychological assessment.
- The small dictionaries and approximate negation can miss sarcasm, context, idioms and nuanced meaning.
- Add industry words to the custom lists, such as outage as negative or resolved as positive, so the counts reflect your field.
- Use the highlight filter to view only negative cues when you want to soften a draft quickly.
Common questions
Can this basic tone detector understand sarcasm or intent?
No. It counts predefined English cues and applies a small negation heuristic. Sarcasm, mixed meanings and context can produce misleading results.
What does a positive tone cue count represent?
It is the number of matched positive lexical cues after any enabled negation adjustment. It is not a percentage chance that the author feels positive.
Can I add custom sentiment words to the tone checker?
Yes. Add comma-separated single English words to the positive or negative list. A word cannot appear in both lists. These additions last only for the current page session.
Why does a contraction like we're count as informal?
The tool treats words ending in n't, 're, 've, 'll or 'm as informal register cues. Expand them if you want a more formal count.
Can a sentence score zero even if it has emotional words?
Yes. One positive and one negative cue in the same sentence cancel out to a net count of zero.
Does the downloaded report include every sentence?
Yes. The page shows up to 100 sentence rows, but the JSON report includes all of them.
Your input is processed in your browser without a ToolWorld Online account. Copy or download anything you want to keep before leaving the page.