Word Counter

A word counter tells you how much text you have written. That sounds trivial until you need the number for something — a 2,000-word limit, a 160-character meta description, a six-minute talk — at which point being approximately right stops being good enough.

This one goes further than counting. Alongside the words, characters, lines, sentences and paragraphs, it works out how long the text takes to read and to say aloud, which words it leans on most, how hard it is to read, and which habits in it are worth a second look. All of it updates as you type, and none of it leaves your browser.

That last part is not a detail. The text people paste into a word counter is almost always unpublished — a draft, an assignment, a client document, a cover letter about a job they have not told anyone they are applying for. Nothing here is uploaded, stored or logged, and the page keeps working with the network switched off.

Counting words means deciding what one is, and the decision shows up in the total. Here a word is a run of letters or digits, optionally joined by an apostrophe or a hyphen — so don’t is one word and so is well-known. Punctuation alone is never a word; numbers are.

1We don't sell well-known brands — we sell 3 good ones.2 3words        94characters   525sentences    1

Sentences are harder. A full stop usually ends one, except after an abbreviation, inside a decimal, in a domain name, or between the initials of a name. Those cases are handled specifically, because sentence count is the denominator of every average and every readability score on the page — get it wrong and everything downstream is wrong with it.

1Dr. Smith paid 3.50 at example.com for it.

Paragraphs are separated by a blank line. If a document has no blank lines at all but several non-empty ones, each line is treated as its own paragraph instead — that is a pasted list, and calling it a single paragraph would distort every per-paragraph figure.

Everything is recalculated from scratch on every change rather than adjusted incrementally, so no figure can drift out of step with the text. Long documents are analysed on a background thread, which is what keeps typing smooth in a manuscript of a hundred thousand words.

Character count

Every character you typed, including spaces, tabs and line breaks. This is the figure almost every platform with a limit means: Twitter, SMS, a database column, a form field that stops accepting input without explaining why.

Character count without spaces

The same count with the whitespace removed. Some academic and translation work is priced or limited this way, and it is the more honest measure of how much writing is actually there — spacing is a formatting choice, not content.

Why character count matters

Because character limits are hard and word limits are soft. Nobody rejects an essay for being nine words over; a form field rejects the 501st character without discussion. The places it bites most often:

• Meta descriptions. Google truncates around 160 characters. Past that the sentence ends in an ellipsis and your call to action is gone.
• Page titles. Around 60 characters before truncation, and the end of a title is where the least important words should live. The meta tag generator writes the title and description tags once the wording is settled.
• Social bios and posts. Every platform counts differently, and several count an emoji as two characters.
• SMS. 160 characters per segment, and one character over means two segments and twice the cost at scale.
• Database and form fields. A VARCHAR(255) does not negotiate.

Set a character goal on the Goals tab and the count turns into a progress bar, which is easier to write against than a number you have to keep checking.

Line count

Physical lines, including blank ones — the same thing a text editor’s gutter shows. A long paragraph with no line breaks in it is one line however far it wraps on screen, because wrapping is a property of the window rather than of the text. That distinction matters when you are counting lines in a CSV, a log file or a list of records.

Paragraph count

Blocks of text separated by a blank line. Paragraph count is the fastest structural read on a document: 2,000 words in four paragraphs is a wall, and 2,000 words in sixty is a list pretending to be prose. The dashboard also shows the distribution of paragraph lengths, which is where an unbalanced draft becomes obvious.

Sentence count

Sentences feed the two figures readers actually notice — average sentence length, and every readability score. Around 15 to 20 words per sentence is comfortable for general writing. Consistently over 25 and readers start losing the thread; the Insights tab flags anything past 30 individually so you can look at the specific offenders rather than the average.

Reading speed

Reading time is words divided by a speed, and the speed is the part worth thinking about. Adults reading general prose on a screen with comprehension average somewhere around 200 to 250 words per minute. That figure drops sharply for unfamiliar or technical material and rises for skimming — though skimming is not reading, and speed-reading claims of several thousand words a minute do not survive a comprehension test.

Estimated reading time

The default here is 200 words per minute, which is where most publishing platforms set theirs. A 1,000-word article is five minutes. It is a useful number to put in front of a reader: an accurate estimate at the top of a piece measurably improves the chance they start it.

Average reading speeds

Switch between them on the dashboard and every figure — including the reading-time goal — recalculates immediately.

Speech duration

People speak considerably slower than they read, which is why a script that takes four minutes to read takes six to deliver. Reading time is the wrong number for anything you intend to say out loud.

Presentation timing

A presentation with slides runs around 130 words per minute — slower than conversation, because you are pausing to change slides and to let a point land. As a rule of thumb, a 750-word script is about six minutes. If you have a ten-minute slot, write about 1,300 words and expect to use all of it.

Public speaking estimates

A large room, a microphone and an audience all slow you down, and the setting here uses 100 words per minute for that reason. Conversation, at 160, is the fastest of the three and is the right setting for a podcast or an interview rather than a talk.

One caveat that applies to all three: the estimate covers the words and nothing else. Pauses, laughter, questions, technical failures and the thirty seconds you spend finding the right slide are not in it. Treat the number as a floor, and rehearse with a timer — it remains the only reliable method.

Keyword frequency

Which words appear most often, counted after the filters you choose. By default common function words are excluded — a table telling you that “the” is your top keyword is not telling you anything — along with numbers and words under three characters.

Keyword density

A word’s share of the words that were counted. Note the denominator: it is the filtered set, not the whole document. If it were the whole document, every density would shrink the moment you excluded stop words, which is the opposite of what the filter is for — you turn them off to see the words carrying the subject, so you want each one’s share of those.

SEO best practices

Here is the honest version: there is no target density, and treating any number as one is how keyword stuffing happens. Search engines stopped rewarding density-based optimisation many years ago, and modern ranking works on semantics rather than repetition counts.

The table is still useful, just not as a dial to tune:

• As a description. If the words you consider the subject are not near the top, the page may not be about what you think it is about.
• As a coverage check. Related terms a reader would expect — and a search engine associates with the topic — either appear or they do not.
• As a repetition check. One word far ahead of everything else is usually a tic rather than a strategy.

Keyword stuffing

Repeating a term unnaturally often to try to rank for it. It is explicitly against Google’s spam policies, it is trivially detectable, and it is obvious to readers — which is the part that actually costs you. The Insights tab flags any word taking more than 2% of the text. Above that, repetition is usually visible on the page.

Flesch Reading Ease

A 0–100 score where higher means easier, calculated from average sentence length and average syllables per word. Above 80 is very easy; 60 to 70 is standard, where most newspapers and general web writing sit; below 30 is postgraduate. It is the most widely recognised readability measure and the one most style guides cite.

Reading grade

Four further formulas — Flesch–Kincaid, Gunning Fog, Coleman–Liau and the Automated Readability Index — answer a different question: how many years of schooling a reader needs. They routinely disagree by a year or two on the same text, because each weighs word length, sentence length and complex words differently. The headline grade on the Readability tab is their average, which is more honest than picking a favourite.

For general audiences, grade 8 to 10 is a sensible target. Government and healthcare guidance often aims for grade 6, because the cost of not being understood is high. Specialist writing for specialists can sit higher without a problem.

Improving readability

Every formula here measures the same two things, so all five respond to the same changes:

• Split long sentences.Find the “and” or “which” joining two ideas and make it a full stop.
• Prefer the plain word.“Use” over “utilise”, “about” over “approximately”. Fewer syllables, same meaning.
• Cut the throat-clearing.“It is important to note that” is six words that carry nothing.
• Break the walls. Paragraph length does not enter the formulas, but it changes whether anyone reads far enough to find out.

And the caveat that matters most: do not write to hit a number. These formulas cannot tell whether a sentence makes sense. A page of short words in short sentences saying nothing scores beautifully. Shortening sentences that were doing real work makes prose worse, and the score will improve on its own once the writing does.

Improve readability by cutting, not simplifying

The fastest way to make writing clearer is to remove the words that are not doing anything, and there are always more of them than you expect. Adverbs propping up weak verbs, hedges like “somewhat” and “fairly”, and the first sentence of most paragraphs — which is frequently the writer clearing their throat before starting. Cutting improves every score on the Readability tab without dumbing anything down.

Reduce repetition you did not choose

Some repetition is the subject asserting itself; an article about databases will say “database” a lot, and that is fine. The repetition worth fixing is the kind you did not notice: the transition you use every paragraph, the verb you reach for by reflex. The keyword table shows both, and the Insights tab separates them by flagging what exceeds 2%.

Structure paragraphs around one idea

A paragraph should be able to be summarised in one clause. If it needs two, there is a seam in the middle and that is where it breaks. Fifty to a hundred words is a comfortable range on screen; anything past 150 is a wall, and readers skip walls. The paragraph distribution on the dashboard shows the shape of the whole document at a glance.

Vary sentence length deliberately

Average sentence length is a useful number and a poor target, because the average is not what a reader experiences — the variation is. A page of twenty-word sentences is monotonous even though it scores well. Mix long sentences that carry an argument with short ones that land it. Then use a short one.

SEO writing that survives contact with readers

Write the piece for the person, then check it against the tool. Cover the subject properly rather than to a length. Put the answer near the top, because most visitors will not reach the bottom. Use the words your readers would use — the keyword table is a decent check on whether you did. And write a meta description that fits in 160 characters, which is the one place on this list where a hard number really does apply.

Two small jobs that come at the end of a draft: the slug generator turns the finished headline into the URL it should be published at, and the Markdown to HTML converter renders a draft written in Markdown into the markup a CMS field expects.