Live word, character, sentence, and paragraph counts with reading time and keyword density.
| Word | Count | Density |
|---|
Ignores common stop words and words shorter than three letters. Density is count divided by total words.
This word counter reports live statistics for any text you paste or type: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, unique words, average word length, and the longest word. It also estimates reading and speaking time, lists the ten most frequent keywords with their density, and charts letter frequency. It is built for writers checking an essay or article limit, students meeting an assignment length, editors trimming copy, and marketers fitting text into meta descriptions, tweets, and ad slots. An optional target shows how far you are from a required word count.
Words are found by splitting on whitespace and discarding tokens that contain no letter or digit, so a lone dash or ellipsis is not a word but hyphenated words and contractions count once. Characters are counted as Unicode code points, so an accented letter or emoji counts as one. Sentences end at a period, exclamation mark, or question mark followed by a space or the end of the text; common abbreviations such as e.g., i.e., Dr., and Mr. and decimal numbers are ignored as sentence ends. Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by at least one blank line. Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed for adults reported in Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis; speaking time uses 150 words per minute, a typical pace for presentations. Keyword density is a word's count divided by the total word count, after removing about 175 common English stop words and words shorter than three letters.
One. The counter splits only on whitespace, so "well-known" and "twenty-one" each count as a single word, which matches how Microsoft Word and Google Docs count them. Text separated by an em dash with no spaces is split into two words.
Words divided by 238 words per minute, the average adult silent reading rate for non-fiction found in a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert. Medium and most publishing tools use a similar figure of 200 to 265 wpm, so treat the estimate as typical rather than exact.
Sentence detection is based on punctuation. Text without terminal punctuation counts as one sentence, headings without a period merge into the next sentence, and unusual abbreviations may split a sentence in two. The counter already skips e.g., i.e., etc., vs., Mr., Mrs., Ms., Dr., Prof., Jr., Sr., and St., plus decimal numbers.
Any word of at least three letters that is not on the built-in stop-word list of about 175 common English words such as the, and, with, or that. Words are compared case-insensitively, so "Report" and "report" are counted together. Density is that word's share of all words in the text, including stop words.
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