Word counter

Paste or type, and the counter rolls as you go. Nothing you write here goes anywhere. Not even to us.

words 0 words

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0 WORDS 0 CHARS 0 MIN

Character limits

What you keep saying

The words and phrases you lean on, with how much of the text they take up. Common words like "the" and "of" are left out.

Words

  1. Nothing to count yet.

Pairs

  1. Pairs show up once you have a few sentences.

Triples

  1. Three-word phrases you repeat land here.

How it reads

– Flesch reading ease, once there is a sentence.

Estimated. Syllables are guessed from vowel groups, so treat the score as a direction, not a grade.

Longest sentence

It will be quoted here.

How the counting works

Words are split the way your browser splits text for a double-click, using its Unicode segmenter, so it handles Chinese, Japanese and Thai, which do not use spaces. Contractions like "don't" and hyphenated words like "well-known" count as one word. Numbers count as words. Characters are counted as the symbols you see, so an emoji or an accented letter is one character, not two or four.

Sentences end at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, with a best effort at abbreviations: "Dr. Okafor", "e.g." and "U.S." do not start a new sentence. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line.

Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed for adults reading English in a 2019 review of 190 studies. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, the usual pace for a talk or an audiobook. Your mileage will vary, and so will your audience's.

The reading ease score

Flesch reading ease is 206.835 minus 1.015 times the words per sentence minus 84.6 times the syllables per word. Higher is easier: 90 and up reads like a children's book, 60 to 70 is plain English, under 30 is academic. This page guesses syllables by counting vowel groups and dropping a silent e, which is right most of the time and wrong on words like "poem". The score is an estimate.

What stays here

Everything on this page is plain JavaScript in your browser. There is no server doing the counting, so there is nothing to send your writing to. Your text is kept in this browser's storage so a refresh does not lose it, and Clear removes it. The only thing this page records is that something was pasted, not what.