Word Counter

How to use the word counter

1. Type directly into the text box or paste something you have already written. The counts update on every keystroke.
2. Read the Counts panel for the hard numbers: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines and unique words.
3. Scroll to Readability to see whether your writing matches the audience you have in mind, and to Keyword density to see which words you lean on most.
4. Pick a preset in the Character limit panel — a post, an SMS segment, a meta description or a title tag — and watch the bar fill as you write. Type a number in the custom field to use any other limit.
5. Press Copy stats to put a plain-text summary of everything on your clipboard.

How the numbers are calculated

Every figure comes from a small, explicit rule rather than a black box.

Readability uses the two Flesch formulas, which take the same three ingredients — total words, total sentences and total syllables — and weigh them differently:

Reading Ease  = 206.835 − 1.015 × (words / sentences) − 84.6 × (syllables / word)
Kincaid Grade =   0.39  × (words / sentences) + 11.8  × (syllables / word) − 15.59

Reading Ease runs from about 0 to 100 and goes up as text gets easier. Kincaid Grade maps onto US school years and goes up as text gets harder, so a grade of 8 means a typical eighth grader should follow it. Both formulas only look at sentence length and word length, which is why they reward short sentences and one-syllable words but cannot tell a clear argument from a confusing one.

Syllables are estimated with a rule-based counter: words of three letters or fewer count as one, a consonant followed by le at the end earns its own syllable so that table is two, silent endings like the e in hope and the ed in walked are removed while the audible ones in wanted and wishes are kept, and what remains is counted as runs of vowels. It agrees with a dictionary on the overwhelming majority of common English words.

Worked examples

A short sentence. Take “The cat sat on the mat.” That is 6 words, 1 sentence and 6 syllables. Reading Ease comes out at 206.835 − 1.015 × 6 − 84.6 × 1 = 116.1, far above the top of the normal scale, and the grade level is −1.5. Very short sentences made of very short words break through both ends of the scale, which is a useful reminder that the formulas are calibrated for paragraphs, not slogans.

A meta description. “Free online word counter with live character, sentence and paragraph counts, reading time and readability scores.” is 112 characters, comfortably inside the 160-character preset, so the bar sits at about 70 percent and shows 48 characters left. Search engines measure snippet width in pixels rather than characters, so treat 160 as a guideline that keeps you safe rather than a hard cutoff.

A 900-word blog post. At 200 words per minute that is a 4 min 30 sec read and, spoken aloud at 130 words per minute, a 6 min 55 sec talk. If the keyword table shows your main topic at 3 percent while the next word down sits at 0.4 percent, you are probably repeating yourself; swapping half of those mentions for pronouns or synonyms usually reads better.

Tips for using these numbers well

• Watch words per sentence, not just the score. Anything averaging over 25 words per sentence is hard to follow no matter what the Flesch number says. Splitting one long sentence usually moves the score more than any other edit.
• Stop words are noise in the keyword table. They are hidden by default because the, and and of are always the most frequent words in English. Turn the filter off only when you want a raw frequency list.
• Unique words versus total words is a quick vocabulary check. A ratio under about 0.4 in a short piece often means heavy repetition.
• Character limits count what the platform counts, mostly. This tool counts Unicode code points. A post counts most emoji as two characters, and an SMS segment drops from 160 to 70 characters the moment you include one non-GSM character such as an emoji or a Korean syllable.
• Trailing spaces count. If your limit says you are one character over, check the end of the text before rewriting the sentence.

Glossary

• Stop word – an extremely common function word, filtered out of frequency analysis.
• Keyword density – how often a word appears as a share of all counted words.
• Flesch Reading Ease – a 0 to 100 score where higher means easier.
• Flesch–Kincaid Grade – the same ingredients expressed as a US school grade.
• GSM-7 – the 7-bit character set that lets an SMS fit 160 characters per segment.

Privacy

Your text never leaves your browser. There is no upload, no analytics event carrying your content and no server-side processing of any kind — the counting, the syllable estimates and the keyword table are all produced by JavaScript running on your own device. That makes the tool safe for drafts under embargo, client copy, private notes and anything else you would not paste into a hosted editor.

Last reviewed: September 21, 2026