Word Counter

This tool counts what?

This tool keeps tabs on everything that most writing tasks require to meet a target or stay within a limit, and more than the mere word count.

• Words and characters, including spaces (with and without)
• Sentences and paragraphs
• Estimated reading time based on an average speed of silent reading and speaking time based on an average speech pace — for video scripts, speeches and presentations
• Readability score — an approximation of the ease of reading your text due to the length of sentences and complexity of words
• Top keywords and keyword density — this is helpful when you're not sure whether you've gotten too many times on a word or phrase
• Estimated Page Count—Standard Formatting (see word to page table below)

All the information is updated while you're typing without any pressing of buttons.

Understanding how Word Counting works.

This seems easy but if it is to reach a specific limit, it matters what the rules are:

• Word counting is done by splitting text on whitespaces (Space, Tab, Line breaks), similar to the way text is split in Microsoft Word or Google Docs. When a word is hyphenated (such as well-known), it is considered one word with no space between the words.
• There are two types of character counting: character counting with spaces (including blank spaces) and character counting without spaces (letters, numbers, and punctuation). If there is a limit on the number of characters for your platform (such as meta description or social post) then it is nearly always "with spaces".
• Sentence counting is able to detect sentence-ending punctuation (periods, question marks, exclamations), although sometimes abbreviations (such as "e.g." or "Dr.") can be confusing by a sentence or two.
• Paragraph counting will find two (or more) consecutive line breaks between blocks of text, just as Word and Google Docs do.

Words to Pages: Quick Reference

The next question that is often asked after getting your word count is approximately how many pages does that equate to? This will vary depending on font, size, spacing, but for the most common academic style (double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman):

These are only rough estimates, depending on the margin, font and amount of white space (headings, bullet points, images) that your document may have.

The following are examples of common platform limits that you should be aware of.

Here are the limits that matter, if you're writing for a particular platform:

There are also reading and speaking time equivalents for other scenarios: A 5-minute conference talk at a typical speaking rate is equivalent to ~650–700 words; a 3-minute video script at an average narration speed is equivalent to ~450–500 words.

Frequently Asked Questions