Word Doctor’s developer says it’s a word editor and writer’s aid, “designed to analyze both writing content and style”.

At first glance, that seems hard to believe, because the editor looks only marginally more powerful than Notepad. But start exploring and you’ll begin to change your mind.

Type or click a word, for instance, and an instant definition appears in the status bar (“word- noun – a unit of language”).

Select a word, right-click, and there’s a synonym finder, a more detailed definition, even an audio pronunciation guide.

The Find and Replace dialog also delivers more than you’d expect. It can specifically search for verbs, nouns or adjectives. There’s regular expression support. And you can run operations across multiple files and folders.

Check and analyze your writing style at any time

A Document Analysis tool scans your words and gives you a breakdown, a “writing style” verdict (Expository/ Descriptive/ Narrative/ Persuasive), highlights key phrases, and more.

The Document Statistics tool provides more straightforward figures – line, character, syllable, sentence and word counts – as well as readability and grade level scores.

An “Evaluate Writing” function highlights what it thinks are problems with phrases and sentences across the whole document.

Bonus features include Speed to Text, and Text to Speech, and there are one or two useful features in Settings (an Autosave frequency).

Word Doctor is a weak editor. It’s missing basic features (Open Recent), doesn’t remember context (the last file type you opened), can’t open multiple documents simultaneously, and plenty more. But the document and writing analysis tools are interesting, and more than enough to justify the download. Give it a try.

Word Doctor is a free application for Windows 7 and later.