Reading and speaking time
Five selectable reading speeds from slow to skimming, plus a separate speaking estimate for scripts, presentations and voice-overs where 130 words a minute is the realistic pace.
Free · No sign-up · Nothing uploaded
Word Counter with live SEO and social limits
Count words and characters as you type, then go further: reading time, speaking time, readability grade, keyword density and live limit meters for SEO titles, meta descriptions and social posts. Everything runs inside your browser — your text is never uploaded.
Counting live
Processed entirely on your device. No text is sent to a server, stored, or logged.
Your text analysed
Live- Words
- 0
- Characters
- 0
- No spaces
- 0
- Sentences
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- Unique words
- 0
- Avg words / sentence
- 0
Reading time 0 sec · Speaking time 0 sec · Readability —
Length limits
Live meters for the places a character count actually matters.
Keyword density
Most-used words, with common filler words excluded.
Add some text to see which words you lean on most.
Why this counter
Six things a plain word counter never gives you
Counting words is the easy part — every tool does it. What writers actually need next is context: whether the piece will hold a reader's attention, whether a headline will be cut off in search results, whether the same word has been repeated eleven times, and whether the prose has drifted into sentences nobody wants to finish. That is the gap this tool fills, without an account, an upload or an advert.
Live length limits
Meters for SEO titles, meta descriptions, X posts and Instagram captions turn green when you are inside the limit and red the moment you go over — no counting on your fingers.
Keyword density
The eight words you use most, with filler words stripped out. The fastest way to catch accidental repetition before an editor or a search engine does.
Readability grade
A Flesch reading-ease score with a plain-English label, so you know whether your draft reads like a newsletter or a legal notice — and can fix it before publishing.
Genuinely private
Everything is calculated in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, saved or logged, which matters when the draft is confidential, unpublished or under NDA.
Fast and unbroken
No ads, no pop-ups, no cookie wall and no heavy libraries. It stays responsive on a phone with long documents pasted in, and works fine offline once loaded.
How to use it
Count and check your text in four steps
Paste your text
Drop in a draft, an essay, a caption or a whole article. Counting begins instantly — there is no button to press and nothing to submit.
Read the core stats
Words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, unique words and average sentence length update on every keystroke.
Check limits and density
Watch the limit meters if you are writing a title, description or social post, and scan the density list for words you have leaned on too heavily.
Edit and copy
Rewrite in place until the numbers look right, then copy the text or copy the full statistics summary for your notes or a client.
Word counts that matter
How long should your writing actually be?
Length is not a quality signal on its own, but every format carries an expectation, and missing it has consequences. An essay under the assigned count loses marks before anyone reads the argument. A meta description over roughly 155 characters gets truncated mid-sentence in search results. A cover letter over one page is often skimmed rather than read.
Reading time is usually the more useful measure. At an average adult pace of about 238 words per minute for silent reading, a 1,000-word article takes just over four minutes — which is why that length became the default for blog posts. Speaking is far slower: presentations and voice-overs land around 130 to 150 words per minute, so a five-minute talk needs roughly 650 to 750 words, not 1,200.
Sentence length deserves as much attention as total length. Averages under 20 words read comfortably; consistently above 25 and readers start re-reading. Keyword density is the same idea applied to vocabulary — in a natural piece, no single meaningful word should dominate. Above roughly 3% and the writing begins to feel repetitive to a reader long before it looks manipulative to a search engine.
- SEO title: around 60 characters before Google truncates it.
- Meta description: about 155 characters on desktop results.
- Blog post: 1,000–2,000 words for most informational topics.
- Cover letter: 250–400 words, one page, no exceptions.
| Format | Words | Reading time |
|---|---|---|
| X / Twitter post | ~50 | 13 sec |
| LinkedIn post | 150–300 | ~1 min |
| Cover letter | 250–400 | ~1.5 min |
| College essay | 500–650 | ~2.5 min |
| Newsletter | 500–800 | 2–3 min |
| Blog article | 1,000–2,000 | 4–8 min |
| Five-minute talk | 650–750 | 5 min spoken |
| Dissertation chapter | 8,000–10,000 | 35–42 min |
Who uses it
Six moments a live word count saves you
Hitting an essay limit
Most assignments allow a 10% margin either way. Watching the count while you cut is far less painful than discovering you are 300 words over the night before submission.
Writing titles and descriptions
Draft the meta description here, watch the 155-character meter, and paste it into your CMS knowing it will display in full rather than trailing off.
Getting paid per word
Freelancers and translators bill on exact counts. Check the piece before invoicing, and check it again after the client's edits come back.
Timing a talk
Paste your script, switch reading speed to slow and use the speaking estimate. It is the difference between finishing on time and being cut off.
Tightening a draft
A high average sentence length and one word dominating the density list usually explain exactly why a paragraph feels heavy to read.
Handling confidential text
Unpublished manuscripts, legal drafts and client work should not be pasted into a tool that uploads them. Here, nothing leaves your device.
FAQ
Word counter questions, answered
How does this tool count a word?
A word is any sequence of characters separated by spaces, tabs or line breaks. Hyphenated terms such as "well-known" count as one word, contractions like "don't" count as one, and numbers count as words. This matches the method used by Microsoft Word and Google Docs, so the totals should line up with the ones your teacher, editor or client sees.
Why does my count differ slightly from Microsoft Word?
Small differences usually come from formatting that plain text does not carry: headers, footers, footnotes, captions, text boxes and comments may or may not be included depending on the settings in Word. Symbols and stray punctuation on their own lines can also be counted differently. For ordinary body text the two agree, and any gap is normally a handful of words.
Is my text sent anywhere or stored?
No. All counting happens in your browser using JavaScript on your own device. Nothing is transmitted to a server, written to a database or retained after you close the tab, and there is no account, login or tracking of what you paste. Once the page has loaded it will even keep working with your connection off.
How long does it take to read 1,000 words?
About four minutes at the average adult silent reading pace of roughly 238 words per minute. Dense technical material can take twice as long, and skimming can halve it. Reading aloud is much slower — around seven to eight minutes for the same 1,000 words. Switch the reading-speed setting to match your audience and the estimate updates instantly.
What is a good keyword density?
There is no official target, and no modern search engine rewards a specific percentage. As a practical guide, a main term appearing somewhere between 0.5% and 2.5% of the time reads naturally. Beyond about 3% the repetition becomes noticeable to readers, which is the real problem. Use the density list to spot unintentional repetition rather than to hit a number.
What does the readability score mean?
It is the Flesch reading-ease formula, which weighs sentence length and syllables per word on a 0–100 scale. Above 60 is comfortable for a general audience, 30–50 reads like academic or professional writing, and below 30 is heavy going. Most web writing aims for 60–70. Shorter sentences and simpler words are the two fastest ways to lift a low score.
Can I count characters for a tweet or Instagram caption?
Yes. The limit meters track your character count against 280 for an X post and 2,200 for an Instagram caption, alongside the 60-character SEO title and 155-character meta description limits. Each meter turns green while you are inside the limit and red as soon as you exceed it, so you can trim before you publish rather than after.
Write to the number, then forget the number
Keep this tab open while you draft. The count, the reading time, the limit meters and the density list update as you type, so you can stop guessing whether a piece is the right length and get back to whether it is any good.