Word Counter

Type or paste your text and every number updates as you go. Words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, lines, reading time, all of it, live. But let's be real about why most people open a word counter: you're either trying to stay under a limit or trying to hit a target. Most counters just spit out numbers and leave you to check them against the limit in your head. This one builds that target right in. Writing a tweet? Pick the 280-character goal and watch the bar fill. Meta description? 160. A 650-word college essay, a 3,000-character LinkedIn post, whatever you're writing to, pick it and the tool just tells you how much room you have left.

No account, nothing gets uploaded, and if you flip on auto-save your draft is still sitting here when you come back.

1. Type, paste, or drop a file. Write straight in the box, paste from anywhere, or drag a plain text file (.txt or .md) onto it. You can also click to open one. The counts update on every keystroke, nothing to submit.
2. Got a target? Pick a goal, either a word count or a character limit like Twitter's 280. A progress bar shows how close you are and how many you have left.
3. Want the deeper stuff? Reading time, speaking time, readability, and your most-used words are all right there underneath. When you're done you can copy the text back, or copy a full stats report to drop into an email.

A word is a run of letters or digits, with an apostrophe or a hyphen inside one keeping it whole, so "don't" and "well-being" each count once. Characters come two ways: with spaces and without. The "without spaces" one is what most social platforms and form limits actually count, so that's usually the number you care about. Sentences, paragraphs, and lines get counted too, though sentences are a best guess (more on that in a second). None of it is fancy, just fast, and it doesn't make you paste into a box and hit a button first.

Reading time takes your word count and divides by a reading speed. The default is 200 words a minute, a normal adult silent-reading pace, and you can bump it slower or faster if your audience reads differently. Speaking time uses a slower 130, because nobody reads a speech out loud as fast as they read it in their head. Both are estimates, so don't treat them as gospel. Your real pace shifts with the material and who's reading it. They're great for "roughly how long is this," not for timing a broadcast to the second.

The readability number is a Flesch Reading Ease score. Higher is easier to read, lower is denser. For most public-facing writing you want somewhere around 60 to 70, which lands at plain, everyday, eighth-to-ninth-grade English. One thing to keep in mind though: it only looks at sentence length and syllables, not whether your writing actually makes sense. So a low score isn't a failing grade. It's a nudge that a few of your sentences are probably too long, and shortening a couple usually fixes it. Rather than fixating on a perfect number, work on writing that reads clearly, and a good score usually comes with it.

One more thing on the score: it only reads English. The syllable estimate works by counting vowel groups in a through z, so a Russian, Greek, or Japanese draft gives it nothing to measure, and the readability and syllable cards show a dash instead of a number.

This is the part I think actually matters most here, because it takes the counting out of your head entirely. Platforms cut you off at hard limits. X stops you at 280 characters. A meta description past about 160 gets chopped in the search results. Instagram caps captions at 2,200, LinkedIn at 3,000. And on the other side, essays and assignments come with minimums you have to clear.

So instead of guessing, pick the goal and the tool does the watching. Choose the 280-character post and it counts down as you type and flags the moment you go over. Same with a word target: set 650 and it shows you're at 480 with 170 to go. It's a small help, but instead of wondering whether you've gone over, you just look down and see how many you have left.

Writing for search? The keyword density view counts how often each word or phrase shows up and shows it as a percentage of your total, listing the top eight so the panel stays readable rather than turning into a wall of every word you used. You can flip between single words, two-word phrases and three-word phrases, and the phrase views only list a phrase that actually repeats, since a two-word run that appeared once is not a pattern worth a row. Hiding the common filler words then lets the terms that matter float to the top. One honest take: there's no ideal percentage to hit, no matter what old SEO posts tell you. Use it to catch a word you've accidentally repeated six times, then go back to writing like a human.

A word is a run of letters or digits, and an apostrophe or a hyphen sitting inside one keeps it whole. That single rule answers most of what people ask here. Hyphenated words like "well-being" and "mother-in-law" count as one, contractions like "don't" count as one, and a hyphenated phone number like 555-1234 counts as one too. Punctuation on the outside is a boundary, so "cat," and "cat." are the same word, and a lone dash sitting between two clauses is not a word at all.

Numbers are where a lot of counters trip. A comma or a period sitting between two digits is part of the number here, so "2024" is one word, "$1,500" is one, "$1,500,000" is one, and "12.5" is one. Paste an invoice or a salary email and the total matches what you would count by hand. The digit on both sides is what keeps that safe. Write "it cost 5. Then we left" and you get six words, because that period has a space after it rather than a digit, so the 5 and the Then never get glued into one. The case it does not cover is "p.m.", which comes out as two, because letting letters join across a period would pull every full stop in your text into the same rule. The paragraph counter and the sentence counter count by that same rule, so the same paste gives you the same word total on all three pages instead of three near-misses.

Two honest limits worth knowing. First, languages that don't put spaces between words, like Chinese, Japanese, and Thai, won't give you a meaningful word count, so lean on the character count there instead. Second, sentence counting looks for a period, exclamation mark, or question mark with a space after it, or the end of your text. So an abbreviation like "Dr." or "p.m." reads as the end of a sentence when it isn't, and the number runs a little high on text that's full of them. A decimal like 3.5 is safe, though, since a sentence only ends where whitespace follows the period and what follows there is a digit. It's a solid estimate for normal writing, just not a grammar engine.