Word and character counter

What counts as a word

Counting words sounds simple until the text has hyphens, numbers, contractions or a language without spaces. The counter uses the browser's own word segmentation, the same rules browsers use to select a word on double click, so don't and state-of-the-art are handled as you would expect, and Chinese and Japanese text, written without spaces, is split into real words instead of counted as one. Characters are counted as people see them, so an emoji or an accented letter is one character even when it takes several bytes.

Reading and speaking time

Reading time divides the word count by a reading speed. The default, 238 words per minute, is the average silent reading speed of adults found in a large 2019 review of reading studies; choose slow (180) or fast (300) to match your readers. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute by default, a comfortable pace for talks and videos, or 110 and 180 for slow and fast speakers. A 1,000 word article takes about 4 minutes to read and 7 minutes to say aloud.

Platform limits

The counter shows each limit as a bar that fills as you type and turns to a warning when you are over, so you can trim a title or a post on the spot.

Keyword density

The keyword list shows the words, or two and three word phrases, used most often, with their count and share of the text. Common words such as "the" and "and" are left out by default, and a minimum length filters out short ones. It is useful to see which terms a page really emphasises, and to catch a word repeated so often it reads badly. Modern search engines do not reward a target density, so write for readers and use the list as a check, not a goal. The list can be copied as CSV.

More details

The details panel adds the size of the text in bytes as UTF-8, which matters for databases and form fields that limit bytes rather than characters, the average word length and the longest word. Open a text, Markdown, CSV, HTML or log file instead of pasting to count a whole document. To write and format text with headings and lists, try the Markdown editor.

If something looks wrong

• The count differs from Word or Google Docs. Each program treats hyphens, numbers and symbols slightly differently. Differences of a few words in a long text are normal.
• An SMS shows as two messages with fewer than 160 characters. One emoji or special character switches the whole message to a format with 70 characters per segment.