Word Counter

How to use it

1. Type or paste into the box. Every number updates as you go.
2. The six counts across the top are the ones most people want. Everything below them is the detail: unique words, longest word, reading time, keyword density and readability.
3. Will it fit? compares your character count against the limits for SEO titles, meta descriptions and social posts, so you can see at a glance whether you are over.

What gets counted as a word

A word is a run of letters or digits, and apostrophes and hyphens inside a word do not split it. So don't is one word, well-known is one word, and 3 in "3 cats" is one word. That matches how a word count in Word or Google Docs behaves, and how an editor counts when you are writing to a limit.

Sentences end at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. Decimals like 3.50, ellipses and initials such as J. K. do not count as endings. Text with words but no punctuation at all still counts as one sentence. Paragraphs are separated by a blank line; a single line break does not start a new one.

Keyword density, and what it is actually for

The table shows your ten most frequent words and what share of the total each one is. Hide common words removes the filler — the, and, of, to — so the list reflects what the writing is about rather than how English works.

Density percentages are always calculated against every word, including the hidden ones, so the numbers do not jump when you toggle the checkbox. That matters: a tool that recalculates against the filtered set will tell you a keyword is at 8% when a search engine sees 3%.

Worth saying plainly: there is no target density to hit. Keyword density stopped being a ranking factor a long time ago, and writing to a number is how pages end up unreadable. Use the table to notice you have said "solution" eleven times, then vary it.

Reading and speaking time

Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, which is the average for adult silent reading of non-technical prose. Speaking time assumes 150, roughly a measured presentation pace. Both are estimates from word count alone — they cannot know that your text is dense legal writing or a list of names, so treat them as a guide for planning a talk or a blog post, not a stopwatch.

Readability

The score is Flesch Reading Ease, which weighs sentence length and syllables per word. Higher is easier: 60 to 70 is plain English, below 30 reads like an academic paper. It needs at least ten words before it will show anything, because the formula is meaningless on a fragment.

One honest caveat. Counting syllables in English cannot be done exactly without a dictionary, so this uses a vowel-group heuristic. It is reliable across a paragraph and wrong on individual irregular words. Use the score to compare two drafts of the same text, not as an absolute grade.

Writing to a limit

The Will it fit? panel is the part most counters leave out. Each bar turns amber at 90% and red when you go over, so you can write straight into the limit instead of counting and comparing by hand.

• SEO title — 60 characters. Google measures pixel width rather than characters, but 60 is the safe approximation for a title that will not be cut off in results.
• Meta description — 160 characters. Same caveat; descriptions are usually truncated somewhere between 155 and 160.
• X / Twitter — 280 characters. The standard account limit. Links are counted as a fixed length by the platform, so a post with a URL may differ slightly.
• SMS — 160 characters. One message segment. Going over does not fail, it just bills as two.
• Instagram — 2,200 characters, but only about 125 show before "more", so the first sentence is the one that matters.
• LinkedIn — 3,000 characters, truncated in the feed after roughly 210.

Questions

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. All the counting is a function running in your browser. You can confirm it in the Network tab of your developer tools, or by disconnecting from the internet and watching it carry on. See our Privacy Policy for the full position.

Is my text saved if I close the tab?

It is kept in this browser's local storage so the page opens where you left it, and it never leaves your device. Clear empties it, and clearing site data removes it entirely.

Why does the character count differ from another tool?

Usually line breaks. Some counters ignore them, some count a Windows line break as two characters. This counts every character you can see plus each line break once, and counts an emoji as one character rather than the two code units it occupies.

Does it count words in other languages?

Yes for anything written with spaces between words, including accented Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. Languages written without spaces, such as Chinese and Japanese, will report a low word count because there is nothing to split on — the character count is the useful number there.