🔢 Word Counter
Real-time word, character & readability statistics — no page reload.
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Words
Characters
including spaces
Characters
without spaces
Sentences
Reading Time
avg 225 wpm
Speaking Time
avg 130 wpm
Avg Word Length
characters per word
Top Words
Common stop words excluded (the, a, and, …)
Not enough unique words to analyse.
Character Breakdown
More Details
Lines
Longest Word
Words / Sentence
Words / Paragraph
How each statistic is derived from your text
Words are counted by splitting the text on runs of whitespace and discarding empty fragments, so double spaces and line breaks do not inflate the total. A hyphenated compound counts as one word because no whitespace separates its parts, while a number or a symbol surrounded by spaces counts as a word in its own right.
Characters are counted twice: once for every character including spaces, which is the figure social platforms and meta description limits use, and once with whitespace stripped out. Sentences are detected by looking for full stops, question marks and exclamation marks, and paragraphs by splitting on blank lines. Lines count every line break, whether or not the line is blank.
Reading and speaking times divide the word count by a rate and convert to minutes and seconds, rounding up so a part minute is never hidden. Reading uses 225 words per minute, a typical adult silent reading pace for prose, and speaking uses 130 words per minute, a comfortable conversational delivery. The frequency list lowercases each word, tallies how often each distinct form appears, and ranks them, which is also where the unique word count comes from.
Characters are counted twice: once for every character including spaces, which is the figure social platforms and meta description limits use, and once with whitespace stripped out. Sentences are detected by looking for full stops, question marks and exclamation marks, and paragraphs by splitting on blank lines. Lines count every line break, whether or not the line is blank.
Reading and speaking times divide the word count by a rate and convert to minutes and seconds, rounding up so a part minute is never hidden. Reading uses 225 words per minute, a typical adult silent reading pace for prose, and speaking uses 130 words per minute, a comfortable conversational delivery. The frequency list lowercases each word, tallies how often each distinct form appears, and ranks them, which is also where the unique word count comes from.
Worked example: an 850 word blog draft
Imagine you paste a blog draft of 850 words spread over 10 paragraphs and 42 sentences, totalling 4,930 characters including spaces.
Reading time divides 850 by 225, giving 3.78 minutes. Converted to seconds that is 226.7, rounded up to 227, which displays as 3 minutes 47 seconds. Speaking time divides 850 by 130, giving 6.54 minutes, or 392.3 seconds rounded up to 393, shown as 6 minutes 33 seconds. The same text takes almost twice as long to say aloud as to read, which is why a five minute talk needs roughly 650 words rather than a thousand.
Average words per sentence is 850 divided by 42, which is 20.2. Average words per paragraph is 850 divided by 10, which is 85. If the frequency list shows the word platform appearing 23 times, that is 2.7 percent of the whole draft, high enough to be noticeable to a reader.
Trimming the draft to 800 words would bring reading time to 3 minutes 34 seconds, since 800 divided by 225 multiplied by 60 is 213.3 seconds, rounded up to 214.
Reading time divides 850 by 225, giving 3.78 minutes. Converted to seconds that is 226.7, rounded up to 227, which displays as 3 minutes 47 seconds. Speaking time divides 850 by 130, giving 6.54 minutes, or 392.3 seconds rounded up to 393, shown as 6 minutes 33 seconds. The same text takes almost twice as long to say aloud as to read, which is why a five minute talk needs roughly 650 words rather than a thousand.
Average words per sentence is 850 divided by 42, which is 20.2. Average words per paragraph is 850 divided by 10, which is 85. If the frequency list shows the word platform appearing 23 times, that is 2.7 percent of the whole draft, high enough to be noticeable to a reader.
Trimming the draft to 800 words would bring reading time to 3 minutes 34 seconds, since 800 divided by 225 multiplied by 60 is 213.3 seconds, rounded up to 214.
What the numbers are good for and where they mislead
Word count is the figure most limits are written in, so it is the one to trust for essays, abstracts and article briefs. Character count matters where a field truncates: search snippets, social posts and form inputs all cut on characters, and whether spaces are included varies by platform, which is why both figures are shown.
Average sentence length is a rough readability signal. Prose averaging around fifteen to twenty words a sentence generally reads comfortably; an average above thirty usually means long chains of clauses that a reader has to hold in their head. It is an average, though, so a mix of very short and very long sentences can produce a healthy looking figure while reading badly.
The time estimates are population averages, not predictions about you. Reading pace varies widely with difficulty, familiarity and purpose, and dense technical text is read far slower than narrative. Presenters usually deliver more slowly than 130 words a minute once pauses are included. Sentence detection also has known blind spots: abbreviations, decimals and ellipses contain full stops, so a text full of them will report more sentences than it really has.
Average sentence length is a rough readability signal. Prose averaging around fifteen to twenty words a sentence generally reads comfortably; an average above thirty usually means long chains of clauses that a reader has to hold in their head. It is an average, though, so a mix of very short and very long sentences can produce a healthy looking figure while reading badly.
The time estimates are population averages, not predictions about you. Reading pace varies widely with difficulty, familiarity and purpose, and dense technical text is read far slower than narrative. Presenters usually deliver more slowly than 130 words a minute once pauses are included. Sentence detection also has known blind spots: abbreviations, decimals and ellipses contain full stops, so a text full of them will report more sentences than it really has.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Every statistic recalculates on each keystroke and on paste, so you can watch a count approach a limit rather than clicking a button to check. This also means you can delete a sentence and immediately see the effect on word count, reading time and the average sentence length together.
Different limits count differently. Social platforms, meta descriptions and most form fields count every character including spaces, while some typesetting and translation rates quote characters excluding spaces. Showing both means you do not have to guess which convention applies to the field you are filling in.
Reading time uses 225 words per minute, which sits in the middle of the usual adult range for silent reading of non-fiction prose. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, a comfortable conversational pace. Both round up to the next second, so a short text never displays as zero time.
It looks for full stops, question marks and exclamation marks followed by a space or the end of the text. That works for ordinary prose but over-counts where abbreviations, initials, decimal numbers or ellipses appear, since each of those contains a full stop. Treat the sentence figure as close rather than exact in technical writing.
It ranks the words you use most often, which quickly exposes repetition you cannot hear in your own draft. A content word appearing in more than about two percent of your text usually reads as a tic. Common function words such as the and of will always top the list and can be ignored.