How to use this word counter
Type or paste into the box and everything updates on every keystroke. There is no "count" button because there does not need to be one — the whole calculation runs in under a millisecond even on long documents.
The counts are more specific than they look, and the definitions matter when you are writing to a hard limit.
What each number actually measures
Words are runs of letters, digits, apostrophes and hyphens. That means "don't" counts as one word, "state-of-the-art" counts as one word, and an em dash surrounded by spaces counts as nothing. This matches how word processors count, so the number here should agree with Microsoft Word and Google Docs on ordinary prose.
Characters counts everything including spaces and line breaks. Characters without spaces strips all whitespace. Academic submission systems and job application forms usually mean the first; some publishing style guides mean the second. Check which one your form means before you spend an hour cutting.
Sentences are detected by terminal punctuation — full stops, question marks, exclamation marks and ellipses. This is a heuristic, not linguistics: abbreviations like "e.g." and "Dr." will inflate the count slightly, and a bulleted list without punctuation will read as one long sentence. Treat it as a good approximation for pacing rather than an exact figure.
Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line. A single line break inside a block does not start a new paragraph, which matches how Markdown and most writing tools behave.
Reading time and speaking time
Reading time uses 238 words per minute, which is the mean silent reading rate for adults reading non-fiction in English, drawn from meta-analysis of reading studies. It is deliberately not the "200 wpm" round number that most blogs use, which underestimates adult reading speed.
Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, a comfortable presentation pace. Conversational speech runs faster, around 150; audiobook narration is slower, around 155 for fiction but often 120 for technical material. If you are timing a conference talk, aim for the 130 figure and then rehearse — nearly everyone speeds up under pressure, so a script that times at exactly your slot will finish early.
Limit checks
The limit table shows how much room you have left against the character limits that come up most often. A few notes on the numbers: the Google title limit is really a pixel width limit of about 600 px, and 60 characters is the practical equivalent for average-width text — a title full of capital Ms will truncate sooner. The 160-character meta description limit works the same way, and Google frequently rewrites descriptions anyway, so treat it as guidance rather than law. X counts URLs as a fixed 23 characters regardless of their real length, so a post with links has more room than this counter suggests.
Keyword density, and how not to misuse it
The density table lists the most repeated meaningful words with the percentage of the total they represent. Common function words — articles, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs — are filtered out, along with words of two letters or fewer, because their frequency tells you nothing.
What density is genuinely useful for is catching unconscious repetition. If "however" appears eleven times in a 600-word piece, you have a tic worth fixing. If your product name appears once in a 2,000-word page about that product, a reader skimming may never work out what the page is about.
What density is not useful for is hitting a target percentage for search rankings. The idea that a page should contain a keyword between 1% and 3% of the time is a relic of search engines from roughly 2005. Modern ranking systems work on semantic relevance and have specifically penalised keyword stuffing for well over a decade. Write for the reader, then use this table to check you have not accidentally repeated yourself.
Privacy
Everything runs locally. Nothing you paste is transmitted, logged or stored — there is no server call in this page at all, which matters if you are checking the length of an unpublished manuscript, a legal document or a confidential report. Text is not saved between visits either, so refreshing the page clears it.