Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count
If you are looking for cutting-edge, scientifically validated insights into how language reveals who people are, you are in the right place.
Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is the world’s gold standard in software for analyzing psychology from language.
From Academia to Application
At Receptiviti, we transform this trusted science into a platform that brings LIWC and psycholinguistic analysis into practical business use - making powerful insights more accessible and impactful.
The best part? Like LIWC, Receptiviti is industry-agnostic. Whether you're in sports, marketing, consulting, HR, or any other field, we help you extract the most value from your language data.
Ready to learn more?
An API to Make Analysis Easy
The Receptiviti API is seamlessly integrated, enhancing the latest AI, ML, and generative models and serving as key ingredients in the secret sauce of products and platforms you know and love.
With Receptiviti, anyone can benefit from the decades of research leveraging LIWC, whether by recreating studies or uncovering a new world of insights through our other frameworks, including Big 5, Drives, and Cognitive Styles.
We Lead the Science. Our Customers Drive the Impact.
By leveraging Receptiviti, our customers help their stakeholders manage and improve:
Hiring
Identify top talent faster, objectively quantify job and culture-fit, and reduce hiring costs.
Team Dynamics
Strengthen collaboration, measure organizational culture, boost productivity, and reduce attrition.
Branding & Marketing
Elevate brand messaging, increase audience engagement, lower customer acquisition costs, and maximize ROI.
Leadership & Growth
Accelerate growth, refine leadership potential, and build elite teams.
Workplace Wellbeing & Digital Health
Enhance wellness programs, reduce burnout, and improve retention and health outcomes.
Diligence & Compliance
Minimize key person risk and support compliance.
Our Mission
With LIWC’s inventor, Dr. Jamie Pennebaker, as our co-founder and our team of linguistics, psychology, and technology experts, we are language psychology dorks focused on producing the highest caliber of science at the intersection of language and psychology.
Our mission is to help platforms and organizations better understand the people and groups who matter most to them.
Scientific rigor is not just our priority - it’s in our DNA.
Dr. James W. Pennebaker
The Relationship between LIWC and Receptiviti
Receptiviti operates as the commercial arm of LIWC (the academic offering). Members of our science, success, and sales teams have worked in Pennebaker’s lab and contributed to various iterations of LIWC. Today, our science team continues to evolve and expand the science, while the customer-facing side of our company supports its application. Receptiviti's science team has developed over 2,600 additional categories using the same validated methodology established in LIWC's original design. Some of these are made available to customers as proportion-based measures (like LIWC Extension), while others are used internally.
Receptiviti’s proportion-based measures, together with LIWC, serve as the foundational ingredients of Receptiviti’s normed algorithmic measures. The normed algorithmic measures are never based on “black box” machine learning models—an important distinction. Instead, they are designed by building formulas from the ground up, selecting and weighting ingredients using both theoretical and data-driven methods.
Theory-based methods draw on more than 34,000 published studies that have used LIWC to predict traits, states, behaviors, and other outcomes. These findings inform how we construct each measure. Data-driven methods include statistical approaches such as principal component analysis, regression modeling, and embeddings to test performance and inform and validate design using our internal datasets.