Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs, with reading time, speaking time and the top keywords by density.
Count words and characters
Runs in your browser. Counts update as you type; nothing is uploaded.
- Reading time
- 0 sec238 words per minute
- Speaking time
- 0 sec150 words per minute
- Avg word length
- —
- Avg sentence
- —
Top keywords
Stop words (the, and, of...) are left out. The ten most frequent words appear here.
What the Word Counter does
Word count is the first number every editor, teacher and SEO brief asks for, but a plain count hides the details that matter: how long the sentences run, how much of the text is one repeated word, how many minutes it takes to read aloud. This counter shows all of that at once and updates on every keystroke, so you can trim a meta description to 155 characters, bring a blog post to 1,500 words or shorten a speech to five minutes without leaving the page.
Paste or type the text and read the panels: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, unique words and the average word length. Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average for adult silent reading of non-fiction, and speaking time uses 150 words per minute, a comfortable pace for a presentation or voice-over. The keyword table lists the ten most frequent words after common stop words are removed, with each one's share of the total so you can spot a term that is overused. The longest sentence is shown in full, because it is usually the one to split.
Nothing you paste is uploaded; counting happens in your browser, and the text disappears when you close the tab.
Step by step
- 01Paste the text into the box, or type directly; the counts update as you go.
- 02Check the words and characters against your target, for example 50 to 60 characters for a title tag or 150 to 160 for a meta description.
- 03Look at the reading and speaking time to size an article or a script.
- 04Scan the keyword table: a single term above about 3 percent of the words usually reads as repetitive.
- 05Use the longest sentence as a pointer to where the text needs a break.
Common questions
Any run of letters, digits or apostrophes separated by spaces or punctuation. Hyphenated words such as "well-known" count as one, numbers count as words, and Urdu, Arabic and other non-Latin scripts are counted by the same rule, so the count matches what most word processors report.
A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark followed by a space or a line break. Abbreviations such as "e.g." or "Dr." can add a sentence, and a heading without a full stop is counted as part of the next sentence. Treat the number as a close estimate.
The reading time divides the word count by 238 words per minute, the figure from a 2019 meta-analysis of silent reading studies. Technical text is read more slowly and fiction faster, so give or take 20 percent for a specific audience. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, which is the pace of a clear conference talk.
The share of all words that a single word accounts for. There is no magic number for search engines, which read topics rather than counts, but a term above 3 percent tends to read as stuffed to a human. Use the table to find words you lean on, not to hit a target.
Keep checking
Keyword Density Checker
Count words and the top one-, two- and three-word phrases on a page or in pasted text, with the density of a target keyword.
Free toolMarkdown to HTML Converter
Convert Markdown to clean HTML in your browser: headings, lists, tables, code blocks, links and images, with a preview.
Free toolSlug Generator
Turn a page title into a clean, lowercase URL slug with stop words removed and a length you choose.
Free toolMeta Tag Analyzer
Check a page's title, meta description, canonical, robots, viewport, Open Graph and Twitter tags with a 0-100 score.
Want these fixes done for you?
Our team runs the audit, makes the changes and reports the result.