Word counter

How to use the word counter

Type straight into the box, paste from Word, Google Docs or an email, or press Open to load a file — .docx, .odt, .pdf or plain text. You can also drag a file onto the box. Word and OpenDocument files are unzipped in your browser and PDFs are read from their text layer, so nothing is uploaded. For a Word file we count the main text, tables and text boxes, as Word’s own status bar does; headers, footers, footnotes and comments are left out. A PDF keeps the line breaks of its layout and includes any running headers and page numbers, so expect a few extra words. Scanned PDFs are pictures of text with nothing to count, and the tool tells you so rather than guessing.

The headline line shows words and characters; the panel beside it adds sentences, paragraphs, reading, speaking and handwriting time, and a reading-level score. Select any passage to count it on its own. Set a goal in words, characters or pages, with an optional maximum for briefs such as “1,500–2,000 words”: the bar fills as you write, turns green in range and red when you run over. Reading speed defaults to 238 words per minute, the adult average in Brysbaert’s 2019 review of 190 studies; speaking to 140, a comfortable presentation pace; handwriting assumes 13. Change the speeds to your own and, for a talk, rehearse with the speech timer.

Find & replace offers match-case, whole-word and regular-expression options with a live match count, and every change can be undone. Print produces a clean page with just your text and its counts. Focus hides everything but your words — in full screen where the browser allows it, and as an overlay on iPhone, sized so the counter stays above the keyboard. Press Esc to come back.

Reading level: what the scores mean

The Flesch reading ease score rates text from 0 to 100 from two things: average words per sentence and average syllables per word. Short sentences and short words score higher. Flesch–Kincaid turns the same inputs into a US school grade; we add the UK year, one higher.

Every formula depends on the syllable count, which is where most online checkers go wrong: simple vowel-counting rules turn wanted, created and being into one syllable and rate ordinary prose as far easier than it is. Ours looks each word up in a list derived from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary — about 5,500 common words that spelling rules get wrong — and falls back to tuned rules for everything else. On our test passages the Flesch score lands within about two points of the textstat reference library — usually much closer — wherever the two count the same sentences.

More readability scores adds Gunning Fog (long sentences plus “complex” words of three or more syllables, not counting names, hyphenated compounds or words that only reach three syllables with -es, -ed or -ing), SMOG (designed for samples of 30 sentences, and flagged when you have fewer), Coleman–Liau and the Automated Readability Index, which use letters rather than syllables. They disagree by a grade or two by design; the average is a fair summary. The scores need at least 30 words and two sentences, and all of them are built for English.

To raise a low score, split long sentences first — the longest sentence link jumps straight to the worst offender — then swap long words for short ones where the meaning survives.

How words, sentences and pages are counted

• Words are runs of characters between spaces or line breaks that contain at least one letter or number. Hyphenated words such as well-known, contractions such as don’t, numbers such as 3.5 and web addresses count as one word, as in Microsoft Word and Google Docs. A lone dash, bullet, emoji or keycap such as 1️⃣ is not a word. Words joined by an em dash are counted separately.
• Chinese and Japanese are written without spaces. By default each character counts as one word, the convention Word and Google Docs use for assignment limits; untick the option under the text box to count dictionary words found by your browser’s segmenter instead, and the other figure is always shown. Thai is split into dictionary words.
• Sentences end at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by a space, or at a blank line. Titles (Dr., Mrs.), fixed abbreviations (e.g., approx., Jan.), reference abbreviations before a number (p. 5, No. 3, fig. 2), initials (J. K. Rowling) and dotted abbreviations inside a sentence (the U.S. report, 5 p.m. on) do not end one. An abbreviation followed by a capital letter, as in “moved to the U.S. Then…”, is treated as a sentence end, which is right far more often than not.
• Paragraphs are non-empty lines.
• Pages are estimated at 500 words single-spaced and 250 double-spaced, the usual figures for 12-point Times New Roman on A4 or Letter with standard margins.

For a character-level breakdown with social media and SMS limits, use the character counter.

Keyword density and repeated words

The keyword density list shows your most frequent words or two- and three-word phrases, how many times each appears and its share of the text. With Ignore stop words ticked, very common words — the, and, of, it’s — are left out, and phrases that start or end with one are skipped, so the list shows what your text is actually about.

Writers use it to catch a pet word; SEO editors use it to check a page is about its target phrase without stuffing it. There is no magic percentage — search engines stopped rewarding a fixed density long ago — but a phrase at 4–5% of a short article reads as repetitive to people too. For a full table of every word, with CSV export and a chart, open the word frequency counter.

Your draft and privacy

With auto-save on, your text is kept in this browser’s local storage on this device only, and restored when you come back. It is never uploaded, and opened files never leave your computer either. Turn auto-save off, or press Clear, and the saved copy is deleted. Private windows discard it when closed, and if your browser blocks site storage altogether — Safari with “Block all cookies”, for example — the auto-save option says so instead of silently failing. Very large texts can exceed the storage quota; the status line tells you, so download a copy.

Frequently asked questions