What is LIWC?
Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a text analysis software program designed by James W. Pennebaker, Roger J. Booth, and Martha E. Francis. LIWC is able to calculate the degree to which people use different categories of words across a wide array of texts. Within emails, speeches, poems, or transcribed daily speech, LIWC allows you to determine the rate at which the authors/speakers use positive or negative emotion words, self-references, big words, or words that refer to sex, eating, or religion. The program was designed to analyze simply and quickly over 70 dimensions of language across hundreds of text samples in seconds.
To learn more about the development and uses of LIWC, click the 'How LIWC Works' button in the left menu.
LIWC2007 is here! 
Two new versions of LIWC are now available for either Windows or Macintosh operating systems. Users who purchased LIWC2001 or LIWClite through this website after 1st January, 2006 are entitled to a free upgrade to LIWC2007 or LIWClite7 respectively.
LIWC2007 comes with a new, more extensive dictionary as well as an option to use the traditional LIWC2001 dictionary if desired. It also allows users to analyse either standard ASCII text files or Microsoft Word documents. The Macintosh version of LIWC2007 has a feature that will highlight in color, all the words found in a particular file when it is analysed. This feature is planned in the next release of the the Windows version of LIWC2007.
In the Macintosh version of LIWC2007, users can also create dictionaries that include literal phrases (e.g. 'you know') as well as individual words and word stems. The next release of the Windows version will also have this feature.
LIWClite7 is similar to LIWClite except that it comes with the option either to use the new, more extensive LIWC2007 dictionary or the traditional LIWC2001 dictionary. Unlike LIWC2007, LIWClite7 cannot handle Microsoft Word documents and will only work with plain text files. LIWClite7 is the student version that is ideal for people with limited text analysis needs.
| Feature | LIWC2007 | LIWClite7 |
|---|---|---|
| Analyze multiple files | Yes | Yes |
| Extensive LIWC2007 dictionary and traditional LIWC2001 dictionary | Yes | Yes |
| Runs on all Windows platforms including Vista | Yes | Yes |
| Runs on all Macintosh G5 and Intel machines including OS X Leopard | Yes | Yes |
| Analyse both text and Word (doc or rtf) documents | Yes | No |
| Analyse Vista Word (docx) documents | Yes (Mac OS X 10.5 only) |
No |
| Use external and user-defined dictionaries | Yes | No |
| Dictionaries can include phrases | Yes (Mac only) |
No |
| Highlight words found in a file | Yes (Mac only) |
No |
| Analyze files in segments | Yes | No |
| Analyze punctuation and numbers | Yes | No |
| Customize categories to include in output | Yes | No |
| Official LIWC manual included |
Yes |
No |
| Price | US$89.95 | US$29.95 |
You can read more about the categories and dictionary features of the new LIWC2007 dictionary by clicking this link.