Word Counter

What this tool does

Type or paste anything and this counter reports words, sentences, paragraphs, lines and how long the piece takes to read or to say out loud. Every number recalculates on each keystroke, so you can watch a 900-word draft come down to the 750 an editor asked for without pasting it anywhere else.

Below the counts it breaks your text into its ten most frequent words. That table is the part people keep coming back for: repetition is invisible while you are writing and obvious the moment it is ranked.

Common uses

• Hitting a hard limit — a 500-word blog submission, a 4,000-character cover letter, a university essay with a ±10% tolerance.
• Sizing a talk. At a measured 150 words per minute, a 15-minute conference slot is about 2,250 words, and scripts run long far more often than short.
• Catching a tic before a reader does. If leverage appears eleven times in 600 words, the frequency table says so immediately.
• Checking sentence length. An average above roughly 25 words usually means several sentences need splitting.

A short example

For this paragraph:

The cache stores the response. The response cache is warm,
so the cache wins.

you get:

Words        14
Sentences     2
Avg words/sentence  7
Top words    cache ×3, response ×2, stores ×1

With "include common words" switched on, the jumps to the top with four occurrences — useful when you are checking rhythm rather than subject matter.

How the counting rules work

A word is any whitespace-separated run containing at least one letter or digit. state-of-the-art counts once, matching Word and Google Docs; a lone em dash counts as nothing. Chinese and Japanese are handled separately, one word per ideograph or kana, since those scripts are not space-separated.

A sentence ends at ., !, ? or … when the next visible character is not lowercase, which keeps Hi… there! as one. A line break also ends one, so headings are not merged into the paragraph below. Abbreviations remain the known weakness of every heuristic of this kind: Dr. Smith arrived counts as two.

A paragraph is a block separated by a blank line, so hard-wrapped text is not over-counted.

Worth knowing

Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the mean for silent reading of English non-fiction in Brysbaert's 2019 review of 190 studies — a better default than the round 200 or 250 most tools assert. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, mid-range for a clear presentation pace. Both are population averages: technical prose with code in it reads much slower.

The frequency table excludes about 130 English function words by default. The list deliberately keeps no and not, because dropping negations changes what a passage appears to say — which matters when you are auditing marketing copy rather than writing it.