What this does

This counts your text as you write it: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and how long it takes to read aloud or in your head. It also works out how hard the writing is to follow and which words and phrases you use most, which is the part that tends to change what you do next.

Everything updates on the keystroke, so you can watch a paragraph land under a limit rather than pasting it somewhere and pressing a button. Nothing is uploaded, which matters more here than on most tools — people paste cover letters, contracts and unpublished drafts into word counters.

How to use it

Paste or type your text into the box.
Set a word goal if you're writing to a limit and a progress bar appears.
Read the counts, or press Copy stats to take them with you.

How the counting works

A word is a run of text between spaces containing at least one letter or number, which is the same rule Word and Google Docs use. So "well-known" counts once, "hello, world" counts twice, and a stray "—" counts for nothing. Chinese and Japanese don't put spaces between words, so each character there counts as one word — the convention translators bill by.

A character is one Unicode character, so an accented letter counts once rather than twice. Most emoji count once; a few built from several pieces, like a flag or a family, count as their pieces.

A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by a space or the end of the text. Decimals, web addresses, initials and common abbreviations — "Dr.", "e.g.", "Ltd." — are excused, so they don't inflate the count.

A paragraph is a block with a blank line around it. If you haven't used blank lines, each line counts as its own paragraph, which is what people writing lists expect.

Reading and speaking time

Reading time assumes 225 words a minute, roughly the adult average for reading silently on a screen; you can drop it to 150 for dense material or raise it to 300 for skimming. Speaking time uses 150 words a minute, about the pace of a clear presentation or an audiobook — useful for timing a talk, where the usual mistake is writing twice as much as the slot allows.

What the readability score means

The score is Flesch Reading Ease, which runs from 0 to 100 and rewards short sentences and short words. Above 60 is plain English that most adults read without effort; newspapers land around 60–70; anything under 30 is heavy going and usually means the sentences have grown too long. The grade level beside it is Flesch–Kincaid, expressed as US school years, so 8 means an eighth grader could follow it.

Both are estimates. They count syllables with a rule of thumb, they don't know whether your words are jargon, and they can't tell good writing from bad. Treat a low score as a prompt to look for a long sentence, not as a verdict. They're calibrated for English, so the numbers mean little for other languages.

Keyword density

The table shows the words or phrases you use most, with their share of the total word count. Writers use it to catch a word they've leaned on three times in a paragraph; people writing for search use it to check a page is about what they think it's about. Common words are hidden by default — otherwise every text on earth ranks "the" first. Phrases are counted within a sentence, so the end of one and the start of the next never combine into something you didn't write.

Is my text private?

Yes. The counting happens in JavaScript inside this page: your text is never sent to a server, never stored, and disappears when you close the tab. You can check by opening your browser's network panel while typing, or by disconnecting from the internet — the counter carries on working perfectly.

Frequently asked questions

Why is my count one or two different from Word's?

Because every counter draws the lines slightly differently — usually around hyphens, numbers, headings and footnotes. The rules used here are set out above, and they match Word and Docs for ordinary prose. If a limit is contractual, count in whatever tool the person setting the limit uses.

Is there a size limit?

Not a fixed one. Whole chapters are fine; a very long book might make typing feel slightly sticky, since the numbers are recalculated as you go.

Does it work offline?

Once the page has loaded, yes. Nothing here needs the network, so an aeroplane or a dead connection makes no difference.

Can I count characters for a tweet or a meta description?

Yes — use the character count, and remember which one the platform means. Most social sites count characters including spaces; search engines care about the pixel width of a title more than its character count, but 155–160 characters is the usual guide for a description.