Word & Character Counter
Live counts as you type, plus reading time, speaking time and the words you lean on most.
238 wpm is the average silent reading speed for non-fiction English prose. Speaking time assumes 130 wpm.
Most-used words
Common function words (the, and, of…) are excluded.
What the word & Character Counter does
This counter updates as you type and reports eight numbers at once: words, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, unique words, reading time and speaking time. The character counts are the ones that matter for anything with a hard limit — meta descriptions around 155 characters, SMS at 160, a bio field capped at 500 — and the two variants are given separately because different platforms count differently.
Words are matched as runs of letters, digits, apostrophes and hyphens using Unicode-aware
matching, so don't and state-of-the-art each count as one word, and text
in French, German, Russian or Greek counts correctly rather than being ignored. Sentences are
detected by terminal punctuation, and paragraphs by blank lines — both are approximations, and
abbreviations such as e.g. will inflate the sentence count slightly.
Reading time defaults to 238 words per minute, which is the figure most often cited from research into silent reading of non-fiction English prose. You can move the slider if your audience reads faster or slower; technical documentation is often estimated nearer 180 wpm. Speaking time uses 130 wpm, roughly a measured presentation pace, which is the useful number when you are writing a script to fit a slot.
The most-used words list strips out common function words and shows the top eight along with how often each appears and what share of the text it represents. It is a quick way to catch a word you have leaned on too heavily, or to sanity-check that an article actually talks about its subject.
How to use it
- Paste your draft into the box, or type directly into it — every count updates live.
- Move the reading-speed slider if the default 238 words per minute does not match your audience.
- Scan the most-used words list to spot repetition before you publish.
A worked example
Pasting a 900-word blog draft returns something like:
| Measure | Value | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Words | 903 | Comfortably past the 800-word floor most editors want for a substantive post |
| Characters (no spaces) | 4,612 | The number platforms with tight limits usually count |
| Sentences | 52 | An average of 17 words per sentence — readable |
| Reading time | 3:48 | The figure to put in a “4 min read” label |
| Top word | browser × 14 (1.6%) | On-topic without being stuffed |
If a single word were showing at 4% or more you would usually want to vary the phrasing — not because a search engine will penalise a number, but because it reads as repetitive.
Frequently asked questions
How is reading time calculated?
Word count divided by the reading speed on the slider, shown as minutes and seconds. The 238 words-per-minute default comes from widely cited research into silent reading of non-fiction English prose; fiction is usually read faster and dense technical writing slower.
Does it count words the same way as Microsoft Word?
Very closely, but not always identically. Word treats some hyphenated and numeric constructions differently. Expect agreement within a fraction of a percent on ordinary prose; if you are working to a contractual word count, check in the tool your client uses.
What counts as a sentence?
A run of text ending in a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis. Abbreviations such as “e.g.” or “Dr.” will each be counted as a sentence ending, so the number is an estimate rather than a grammatical parse.
Is my draft saved or sent anywhere?
No. Counting happens in this page's JavaScript and nothing is stored — refresh the page and the text is gone. Unpublished drafts are precisely the kind of text that should not be uploaded to a stranger's server.