Free Plagiarism Checker
Paste your text to find out whether any of it has already been published elsewhere. Copied and reworded sentences are highlighted in place, each one linked to where it came from.
What the Plagiarism Report Actually Tells You
A single percentage hides more than it explains. This checker separates the two things that matter and shows the evidence behind both.
Copied word-for-word
Sentences that appear in a published source with the wording essentially unchanged. These are the ones that get flagged by an instructor, an editor, or a search engine, and they are the first thing to fix.
Reworded from a source
Passages that carry the same meaning and structure as a published page while using different words. Light paraphrasing still counts as plagiarism in academic work, so these are worth reviewing even though they read as original.
The sources behind each match
Every page that matched is listed and ranked by how much of your text it accounts for. Select one to isolate just its matches, or open the page itself to check the original in context.
Built for Students, Writers, and Content Teams
Students
Check an essay before you submit it. Paraphrased source material is the most common reason honest work gets flagged, and the amber highlights show you exactly which sentences still sit too close to the original.
Bloggers and freelancers
Verify that commissioned or outsourced writing is genuinely original before it goes out under your name. Each match links to its source, so you can judge for yourself rather than trusting a score.
SEO and content teams
Duplicate content competes with the page it was copied from. Running a draft through the plagiarism checker before publishing catches passages that were lifted from a competitor or recycled from your own site.
Editors and educators
Get evidence instead of a verdict. The side-by-side comparison shows your sentence next to the passage it matched, so a judgement call stays a human one.
Why a Percentage on Its Own Is Not Enough
Most plagiarism checkers hand back one number and leave you to interpret it. That number is close to useless on its own, because two very different documents can score the same.
A paper that quotes three sources correctly and cites all of them might score 18%. A paper that silently paraphrases a single article from beginning to end might score the same 18%. The first is fine. The second is not.
This checker is built around that distinction. Instead of leading with a score, it turns your own text into the report: the sentences that matched are highlighted where they sit, and selecting one shows the passage it matched beside it. You are reading evidence, not a verdict.
Copying and Paraphrasing Are Detected Differently
Verbatim copying is the easy case. If a run of words from your text appears on a published page, the overlap is unambiguous and gets marked in red.
Paraphrasing is the harder and more common case. A sentence can share no distinctive wording with its source and still be plagiarised, because the ideas, order, and structure were taken wholesale. Those passages are marked in amber.
The distinction matters because the fix is different. Copied text usually needs a quotation mark and a citation. Reworded text usually needs either a citation or a genuine rewrite that puts the point in your own words.
What Counts as Plagiarism
Plagiarism is presenting someone else's words, ideas, or structure as your own. It does not require intent, which is why honest writers still get flagged. The common cases are:
- Direct copying — reusing sentences from a source without quotation marks.
- Paraphrase without attribution — restating a source's point in different words but never crediting it.
- Patchwriting — swapping individual words for synonyms while keeping the sentence structure intact. This is the most common accidental form, and the one synonym-swapping rewriters actively encourage.
- Self-plagiarism — republishing your own earlier work as new. Harmless socially, penalised academically, and treated as duplicate content by search engines.
What This Checker Does Not Do
Being clear about the limits is part of being useful.
It searches pages that are publicly reachable on the web. It does not have access to private university submission archives, paywalled journal databases, or unpublished student papers, so a clean result here is not a guarantee that the system your school or publisher uses will return the same.
It also cannot tell plagiarism from correct quotation. A properly quoted and cited passage will still be highlighted, because the text genuinely does appear elsewhere. That is working as intended — the highlight tells you where the overlap is, and you decide whether it is already accounted for.
Finally, a short common phrase matching several unrelated sites is usually just ordinary English. The checker downweights phrasing that turns up across many different domains, but the source list is there so you can sanity-check anything that looks odd.
What to Do About the Matches
Once you know which sentences matched and where they came from, there are three honest ways forward.
- Quote and cite it. If the original wording is worth keeping, put it in quotation marks and credit the source. Nothing else needs to change.
- Rewrite it properly. Not a synonym swap — a genuine restatement of the point in your own words and your own sentence structure, with a citation if the idea is not yours.
- Cut it. If a passage only exists because it was easy to borrow, the draft is usually better without it.
When a rewrite is the right answer, you can send the checked text straight to the reword generator from the results screen — it carries the text across so you do not have to copy and paste it yourself.
Plagiarism Checker — Frequently Asked Questions
Found matches? Rewrite them properly.
The reword generator rewrites a passage in your own voice rather than swapping synonyms — which is what causes patchwriting in the first place. Send your text across in one click.