Word Counter

Counting is the easy part. Use the rest.

Most word counters stop at the number. The more useful figures here are the ones that tell you something about the writing.

The readability score is Flesch Reading Ease, which rates text from Easy through Standard and Difficult to Very Difficult based on sentence length and word length. It is a rough measure rather than a verdict — a technical document is legitimately Difficult — but if you were aiming for plain language and it reads Difficult, that is worth knowing before you publish.

The longest sentence is the single most useful thing on this page, and almost no other word counter shows it. Long sentences are the most common cause of writing that feels heavy, and the longest one in any piece is usually the one that needs breaking up. Having it pulled out and displayed means you can fix the worst offender without hunting for it.

Top 10 most used words catches unintentional repetition — the word you have leaned on eleven times without noticing. Unique words against the total gives a quick sense of how varied the vocabulary is.

Reading time and speaking time are different numbers

Reading time assumes a normal silent reading pace. Speaking time is slower, because talking is slower than reading, which is why it is the one to use when you are writing a presentation, a video script or a speech.

That difference catches people out. A script that takes four minutes to read will take closer to six to deliver, and if you have a five-minute slot you will be cut off. Write to the speaking figure for anything you will say out loud, and remember it excludes pauses — so leave some slack.

Hitting a specific limit

Check whether your limit counts words or characters, because they are not interchangeable. Academic work and articles are almost always word limits. Social bios, meta descriptions, app store fields and SMS are character limits, and they usually mean characters including spaces — which is why both figures are shown separately here.

Nothing is transmitted

Everything is calculated in your browser as you type, with no request to any server at any point. Your draft never leaves the page, so an unpublished manuscript or a confidential report can be checked without a second thought — and there is no cap on how much text you paste in.

Related tools

Grammar Fixer corrects errors once the length is right, and Text Summarizer cuts something down when you are well over a limit.