Free Word Counter

Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs instantly. Measure reading and speaking time, analyse keyword density, and check social media character limits — all in real time, right in your browser.

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Reading time: 0 sec
Speaking time: 0 sec
Unique words: 0
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Top Keywords & Density
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Start typing to see keyword frequency.
Social Media Character Limits
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Works 100% in your browser
Text never leaves your device
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What This Word Counter Does

Paste or type any text into the editor and every metric updates instantly — no button to click, no page reload. The tool counts words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, unique words and average word length, all computed entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Because nothing is ever sent to a server, you can safely paste confidential documents, medical notes, unpublished drafts or private correspondence without any privacy risk whatsoever.

Beyond raw counts, the tool estimates how long your text takes to read and speak. Reading time is calculated at 238 words per minute, which reflects the average adult silent reading speed documented in peer-reviewed research. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute — a measured conversational pace appropriate for presentations, podcasts and voice-over scripts. Both figures update in real time as you type, making it practical to write directly to a target duration rather than working backwards from a finished draft.

The keyword density panel filters out common stop words like "the", "and" and "is" automatically, so the table surfaces only the substantive terms that carry topical meaning. This makes it useful for both SEO copywriting — where you want to verify you're using a target phrase at the right frequency — and for general editing, where a term appearing unexpectedly high in the table often signals overuse worth addressing. The social media panel tracks your character count against eight platform limits simultaneously, colour-coding each one green, amber or red so you can see overruns without doing any mental arithmetic.

Tips for Getting the Most Accurate Count

Frequently Asked Questions

How are words counted — does it match Microsoft Word?

Words are identified using a Unicode-aware boundary pattern that matches sequences of letters, digits and apostrophes. Hyphenated compounds such as self-aware are treated as a single word, which is consistent with how most editorial style guides and academic submission platforms define a word. Abbreviations, contractions and standalone numbers each count as one word, and pure whitespace is ignored entirely.

This method aligns closely with Microsoft Word's built-in counter for standard prose, so the figure you see here should match your word processor in most cases. Small discrepancies can arise from edge cases — URLs, email addresses, numeric punctuation and currency symbols — which different tools interpret differently. Clicking the Clean Spaces button before counting eliminates the most common source of variance between tools.

What is the difference between reading time and speaking time?

Reading time is calculated at 238 words per minute, which reflects average adult silent reading speed based on published cognitive research. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, a natural conversational pace suitable for presentations, recorded video scripts, podcasts and any content that will be read aloud to an audience.

The two figures serve different planning goals. Reading time tells you whether a blog post, article or email is concise enough for your audience's attention span — a five-minute read is often the practical upper limit for most web content. Speaking time lets you rehearse talks, check whether a prepared script will fit a defined slot, and avoid the frustration of discovering mid-presentation that you've written four minutes too much. If you need to calibrate for a specific audience — for instance, children read more slowly than adults, and ESL readers slower still — our dedicated Reading Time Calculator lets you set a custom words-per-minute rate.

What is keyword density and why does it matter for SEO?

Keyword density is the percentage of times a specific word appears in your text relative to the total word count. Most SEO practitioners aim for 1–2% density on the primary target keyword — frequent enough to signal topical relevance to search engines, but not so repetitive that it reads as over-optimised or unnatural to human readers. Google's algorithms are sophisticated enough to penalise content that keyword-stuffs aggressively, so the goal is natural integration rather than mechanical repetition.

The keyword table in this tool filters common stop words automatically, so you see only the substantive terms that give your content its character. If a phrase you want to rank for appears nowhere in the table, your copy almost certainly needs to address that topic more directly. If a word appears at 4–5% or higher, consider whether you're using it too mechanically and whether synonyms or related phrases could do some of the work instead. Once you've settled on your primary keyword phrase, use our Text to Slug Generator to convert it into a clean, hyphenated URL slug.

What are the social media character limits for each platform?

Character limits vary significantly between platforms and affect how your content displays. Twitter/X caps posts at 280 characters. Instagram captions allow up to 2,200 characters, but only the first 125 are visible before the reader has to tap "more", so the opening line carries disproportionate weight. LinkedIn posts support up to 3,000 characters and tend to reward longer, more substantive content. Facebook allows a generous 63,206 characters for posts. TikTok bios are limited to just 80 characters, making brevity essential. YouTube descriptions allow up to 5,000 characters.

For SEO and search results, Google typically displays page titles up to about 60 characters and meta descriptions up to 160 before truncating. Going over either limit doesn't cause a technical error, but the truncated text appears with an ellipsis in search results, which can hurt click-through rates. The Social Media panel above colour-codes each platform green (under 85% used), amber (85–100%) and red (over limit) so you can spot overruns across all eight at a glance.

Does the word counter work with languages other than English?

Yes. The counter handles any language that separates words with spaces accurately, including French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, Russian, Polish and others. The Unicode-aware matching pattern correctly recognises accented characters, so words like résumé, naïve or Straße are counted correctly rather than being split at the accented character.

For languages without word-boundary spaces — Chinese, Japanese and Thai in particular — the character count remains precise and is typically the more meaningful metric to track. The keyword density table will still function for these scripts in terms of identifying repeated character sequences, though the stop-word filter is calibrated for English. If your multilingual text needs case normalisation, our Case Converter handles accented and extended Latin characters correctly across French, German, Spanish and Eastern European scripts.

Can I use this for academic essays and assignment submissions?

Absolutely. Paste your essay into the editor and read the word count from the highlighted stat card at the top of the page. If your institution specifies a maximum character count as well as a word limit, enable the appropriate preset from the Limit dropdown and the progress bar will show you exactly where you stand. Because the tool runs entirely in your browser, there is no risk of your draft being stored, indexed or accessed by anyone else.

The unique word count and average word length statistics can also help assess vocabulary diversity before submission. A low unique-word ratio relative to total words often indicates that certain terms are being repeated too frequently — something that can read as limited range to an academic marker. For final submissions it is always worth verifying the count in your word processor as well, since URLs and specialist notation can occasionally produce small discrepancies between tools.

What is average word length and what does it reveal about my writing?

Average word length measures the mean number of letters per word across your entire text, excluding punctuation. In standard English prose it typically falls between 4.5 and 5.5 letters. Text with a high average — above 6 or 7 letters — tends to feel dense and formal, which is appropriate for academic papers, legal documents and technical writing, but harder for general audiences to skim quickly. Text with a low average — below 4 letters — reads as simple and conversational, which works well for marketing copy, news articles and content targeting a broad web audience.

Readability researchers often combine average word length with average sentence length to estimate reading difficulty. If you're targeting a general audience and your average word length is high, look for polysyllabic words that have simpler, shorter alternatives — "use" instead of "utilise", "help" instead of "facilitate". If your copy targets a broad web audience, you can verify the resulting reading difficulty using our Reading Time Calculator, which estimates how long the text will take different audience types to read.

How do I set and track a character limit for social media or ad copy?

Use the Limit dropdown in the editor toolbar to select a platform preset — Twitter (280), Instagram (2,200), LinkedIn (3,000), Meta Description (160), Meta Title (60) — or a custom count of 500, 1,000 or 2,000. As soon as you select a limit, a progress bar appears below the text area showing how many characters you have used and how many remain. The bar turns amber when you reach 80% and red when you exceed the limit, and the remaining count switches to showing how many characters over you are.

This is especially useful when writing Google ad headlines, email subject lines, SMS messages and social captions where exceeding the limit causes content to be truncated or rejected outright. The Social Media panel lower on the page gives a complementary overview — it tracks all eight platforms simultaneously so you can see at a glance which ones your current text fits and which it overflows, without having to switch the dropdown repeatedly.

Why might my count differ slightly from Microsoft Word or Google Docs?

Small discrepancies between word counting tools are normal and usually trace back to a small number of edge cases: how URLs are handled (one word or several), how email addresses are treated, whether numeric punctuation like 3.14 or $1,200 is split at the symbol, and how contractions are processed. Each tool applies its own rules for these, which means counts on identical text can legitimately differ by a handful of words.

The most common practical cause is excess whitespace introduced when copying from PDFs, HTML pages or rich text editors — multiple consecutive spaces, non-breaking spaces or hidden formatting characters that inflate the apparent word count. Clicking the Clean Spaces button in the toolbar normalises all of this before counting. For academic or editorial submissions where the count must be exact, always verify in the word processor you'll be submitting from, and use this tool for the working drafts where instant in-browser feedback is more valuable than the final verified figure.

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