Word limits are everywhere: college application essays, cover letters, grant abstracts, conference talks, product descriptions and news articles. This word counter tallies your text as you type or paste it — words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and lines — and estimates how long it takes to read silently or deliver out loud. A keyword table shows which words you lean on most.
How to use the word counter
- Type in the box, or paste text from a document, email or web page.
- Read the word count on the tape, with characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs and lines below it.
- Check the reading time and speaking time, the average word and sentence lengths, and the longest word.
- Scroll to Most frequent words to spot repetition. Untick Hide common words to include words like “the” and “of”.
How the counts are calculated
- Words are runs of letters or digits; internal apostrophes and hyphens keep a word together.
- Sentences end with a period, question mark, exclamation point or ellipsis followed by a space or the end of the text.
- Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by a blank line.
- Characters are counted as you see them, so an emoji or an accented letter counts once.
Worked example
The sample text in the box has two paragraphs. The counter finds 60 words and 322 characters (262 without spaces) in 4 sentences, an average of 15 words per sentence. At 238 words per minute it takes about 15 seconds to read, and at 140 words per minute about 26 seconds to say aloud. The longest sentence has 24 words, and “long” and “see” are the most repeated content words, each used twice.
Typical length targets
| Writing task | Usual length |
|---|---|
| Common App personal essay | up to 650 words |
| Cover letter | 250–400 words |
| Abstract for a journal article | 150–300 words |
| Blog post | 800–2,000 words |
| One-minute spoken pitch | about 130–150 words |
| Five-minute talk | about 700 words |
Always follow the exact limit your instructor, publication or application portal gives; some count characters instead of words.
Writing tighter text
Watch sentence length
Plain-language guidance from U.S. federal agencies recommends keeping average sentences to about 15–20 words. If your average climbs above 25, look for sentences that join two ideas with “and” or “which” and split them.
Cut repeated words
The keyword table makes overused words obvious. If a word you did not intend to emphasize shows up five times in 300 words, vary it or remove some instances. For search-engine writing, aim for natural language rather than a target density; repeating a keyword does not help readers.
Trim filler
Phrases such as “in order to” (use “to”), “due to the fact that” (“because”) and “at this point in time” (“now”) add words without meaning. Removing a few of them is often enough to get under a limit.
When a platform limits characters rather than words — social posts, text messages, meta descriptions — switch to the character counter, which checks your text against common limits.
Frequently asked questions
How does the word counter decide what a word is?
A word is any run of letters or digits. Hyphenated words such as 'well-known' and contractions such as 'don't' count as one word, numbers such as 2026 count as words, and punctuation and emoji on their own do not. This matches how most word processors count.
How is reading time estimated?
The word count is divided by 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed for English nonfiction found in a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies by psychologist Marc Brysbaert. Speaking time uses 140 words per minute, a comfortable pace for presentations.
Why might my count differ slightly from my word processor's?
Programs disagree about edge cases: dashes without spaces, URLs, numbers with decimals, and words joined by slashes. The difference is usually a word or two in a few hundred, well within any assignment's tolerance.
Is my text stored or sent anywhere?
No. The counting happens in your browser. Your text is not uploaded or saved, although using Copy link will place it in the page address so you can share it, so avoid that for private text.
What does the most-frequent-words table show?
The ten words you use most, with their counts and their share of all words (keyword density). Common words such as 'the' and 'and' are hidden by default so the list highlights your content words; untick the box to include them.