Word Censor Tool

What Is the Word Censor Tool?

This tool replaces every whole-word, case-insensitive occurrence of words you specify with asterisks matching the word's length. You supply the word list -- there's no built-in moderation dictionary, so nothing is filtered automatically or assumed on your behalf.

How to Use This Tool

Enter your text and a comma-separated list of words to censor. The censored result appears instantly.

What Happens Behind the Scenes

The tool takes your comma-separated list, trims the spaces around each entry, and ignores any empty entries. Then it goes through your list one entry at a time. For each entry it searches the whole text for that exact word between word boundaries, ignoring upper and lower case, and replaces every match with a row of asterisks equal in length to the matched text. The small counter under the result shows how many replacements were made in total. Special characters in your entries, such as a period or a plus sign, are treated as plain text and not as search patterns, so you do not need to escape anything.

Because the replacement keeps the same number of characters, the censored text keeps its original length and layout. A five-letter word becomes five asterisks, which makes the result easy to compare with the original and keeps any fixed-width formatting intact.

A Worked Example

Imagine you are preparing a customer message for a shared internal report and you want to hide a name and a project code. You paste this text: "Maria approved Project Falcon on Monday. Then MARIA sent Falcon updates." In the word list you type: Maria, Falcon.

• Every occurrence of Maria, in any capitalization, becomes five asterisks.
• Every occurrence of Falcon becomes six asterisks.
• The result reads: "***** approved Project ****** on Monday. Then ***** sent ****** updates."
• The counter reports 4 words censored: two for Maria and two for Falcon.

Notice that "Project" and "Monday" are untouched because they are not in your list. The tool never guesses which other words might be sensitive.

Whole-Word Matching and What It Means for Your List

Since matching is whole-word only, each form of a word needs its own entry when you want it hidden. Censoring "run" will not touch "running" or "runner". If you want all three hidden, list all three, separated by commas. Plurals follow the same rule: "cat" and "cats" are different entries. On the other hand, an apostrophe or hyphen counts as a boundary, so censoring "cat" will hide the "cat" part of "cat's" and of "cat-like", leaving the rest of the word visible.

Entries that begin or end with a symbol, such as "c++" or "#hashtag", work too: a match must not be directly preceded or followed by a letter, digit or underscore, so "c++" is censored in "I like c++ a lot" but "cat" is not censored inside "concatenate".

Multi-Word Phrases and Overlapping Entries

You can enter a phrase such as "credit card", and it will match only when the words appear with exactly the same spacing as typed, including a single space between them. A line break or double space between the two words in the text will prevent a match. Overlapping entries are processed in the order you list them. If you enter both "credit card" and "card", the longer phrase is replaced first, and the leftover asterisks are not matched again, so the count stays accurate. If you list the shorter word first, the phrase will be split up: "card" turns into asterisks, and "credit card" will no longer be found.

Limits and Sensible Use

• This is a simple text replacement, not a security or privacy guarantee. Asterisk length reveals the length of the original word, which can help someone guess it. For real redaction of sensitive documents, remove the text entirely and verify the final file.
• The tool works only on what you paste. It does not remove a word from an image, a PDF, or the original source document.
• There is no built-in list of offensive or private terms. If a word slips through, it is because it was not in your list or because its spelling differed, such as a misspelling, a variation with punctuation inside, or a spaced-out version.
• Always read the output once. Spelling variants, nicknames, and abbreviations of a name will not be caught unless you list them.

Where It Comes in Handy

Common uses include masking names before sharing an excerpt of a chat log, hiding spoilers in a review, preparing classroom examples with names removed, cleaning a comment before posting it in a community with word rules, and creating fill-in-the-blank exercises by censoring the vocabulary words. Because everything happens in your browser on the text you type, it is a quick way to mask a few terms without setting up any software.

Frequently Asked Questions