Word Counter
Updated Free mock REST & WebSocket APIs
Type or paste your text to count words and characters instantly. You also get sentences, paragraphs, reading and speaking time, keyword density, a Flesch readability score and progress bars for common limits. Your text autosaves in this browser.
- Words
- 0
- Unique words
- 0
- Characters
- 0
- Characters (no spaces)
- 0
- Sentences
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- Average word length
- 0.0 characters
- Average sentence
- 0.0 words
- Reading time
- 0 sec
- Speaking time
- 0 sec
- Lines
- 0
- Size
- 0 bytes (UTF-8)
🔒 Runs in your browser and autosaves on this device only — your text is never uploaded.
How to count words
- Type in the box, paste text, or open a .txt or .md file. Counts update with every keystroke.
- Read the totals at the top: words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, reading time and speaking time.
- Open Keyword density to see your most-used words and phrases, or Readability for the Flesch score and grade level.
- Under Limits & targets, check a post, meta description or essay against its limit, or set your own word goal.
How words are counted
- Hyphenated words and contractions count once. “State-of-the-art”, “well-known” and “don't” are each 1 word. Microsoft Word and Google Docs count them the same way.
- Numbers are words. “3.14” and “1,000,000” are 1 word each.
- Punctuation, symbols and emoji aren't words. A lone dash or 🎉 doesn't change the count.
- Chinese and Japanese are counted per character. These languages don't put spaces between words, so each Han, Hiragana or Katakana character counts as a word. Korean uses spaces, so it's counted like English.
- Characters are what you see on screen. 👍🏽 and é count as 1 even though they take several code units.
How long is it? Words to pages and minutes
| Words | Pages (single-spaced) | Pages (double-spaced) | Reading time | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 250 | 0.5 | 1 | 1 min | 2 min |
| 500 | 1 | 2 | 2 min | 4 min |
| 750 | 1.5 | 3 | 3 min | 5 min |
| 1,000 | 2 | 4 | 4 min | 7 min |
| 1,500 | 3 | 6 | 6 min | 11 min |
| 2,000 | 4 | 8 | 8 min | 14 min |
| 3,000 | 6 | 12 | 13 min | 21 min |
| 5,000 | 10 | 20 | 21 min | 36 min |
Page counts assume 12-pt Times New Roman with 1-inch margins, which gives about 500 words single-spaced or 250 double-spaced. Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average for silent reading of non-fiction found in a 2019 meta-analysis by Brysbaert. Speaking time uses 140 wpm, a normal pace for a talk or presentation.
Readability: what the Flesch score means
The Flesch Reading Ease score is 206.835 − 1.015 × (words ÷ sentences) − 84.6 × (syllables ÷ words). Higher scores are easier to read. The Flesch–Kincaid grade, 0.39 × (words ÷ sentences) + 11.8 × (syllables ÷ words) − 15.59, turns the same inputs into a US school grade. Syllables are estimated from vowel groups plus rules for silent endings, which is right for roughly 9 out of 10 English words.
| Score | Reading level | Typical text |
|---|---|---|
| 90–100 | Very easy (5th grade) | Children's books |
| 70–90 | Easy to fairly easy | Fiction, conversational blogs |
| 60–70 | Plain English | News, most web copy: a good target |
| 30–50 | Difficult (college) | Academic papers, contracts |
| 0–30 | Very difficult | Legal and scientific text |
Common word and character limits
- Common App personal essay: 250–650 words.
- X (Twitter) post: 280 characters. Emoji and CJK characters count as 2, and every link counts as 23.
- Meta description: about 155 characters before Google cuts it off. Title tag: about 60.
- SMS: 160 characters, or 70 if the message contains any emoji or non-Latin letter. Use the character counter to see the segments.
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Frequently asked questions
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
No. Everything runs in your browser, so your text never leaves your device. Nothing is logged or stored on a server.
Does the word counter save my text?
Yes, it saves in your browser's local storage on this device only, so your draft is still there if you close the tab. Click Clear to remove it.
Why is my count different from Microsoft Word or Google Docs?
Tools handle edge cases differently: dashes between words without spaces, URLs, numbers with symbols, and footnotes. We follow Word's main rules (hyphenated words and contractions count once), so counts usually match within a word or two.
How many pages is 1,000 words?
About 2 pages single-spaced or 4 pages double-spaced, in 12-pt Times New Roman with 1-inch margins. It takes about 4 minutes to read and 7 minutes to say out loud.
What is keyword density?
How often a word or phrase appears, as a percentage of all words. If a word appears 10 times in 500 words, its density is 2%. Search engines don't reward a particular density, so use the number to catch words you repeat too often.
Does it count words in other languages?
Yes. Any language that puts spaces between words is counted by word, including accented Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and Korean. Chinese and Japanese are counted one word per character, the same as Word and Google Docs.
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