Word Counter — Count Words, Characters & Reading Time

Live word, character, sentence and paragraph counts as you type, plus reading time, speaking time and keyword density. Everything runs in your browser — your text never leaves your device. 📝

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Word Counter

Live as you type

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Words
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Characters
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Characters (no spaces)
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Sentences
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Paragraphs
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Reading time (238 wpm)
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Speaking time (130 wpm)

🔒 Counting happens entirely in your browser — your text never leaves your device.

How to Use the Word Counter

  1. Type or paste your text — words, characters, sentences and paragraphs update live.
  2. Click Analyze to refresh all stats including reading time, speaking time and keyword density.
  3. Check the keyword table to spot overused words before you publish.

Live as you type

Every keystroke updates the counts instantly — no button mashing needed while you write.

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Keyword density

Top-10 keyword table (stopwords filtered) shows which words you repeat and how often.

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Private

Drafts, essays and confidential copy are analyzed locally — nothing is uploaded.

Why Word and Character Counts Matter

Almost everything you write in 2026 has a length target. College application essays via the Common App cap out at 650 words; many class assignments specify 500, 1,000 or 2,500 words; and standard US college admissions short answers run 150–250 words. A free word counter takes the guesswork out — paste your draft and instantly see whether you need to trim or expand, plus sentence and paragraph counts to gauge structure.

Character limits rule the web: an X (Twitter) post is 280 characters for standard accounts, an Instagram caption allows 2,200, a LinkedIn post about 3,000, and a YouTube title 100. For SEO, Google typically displays around 60 characters of a title tag and roughly 155–160 characters of a meta description before truncating — the "characters (no spaces)" and "characters" stats here let you stay inside every one of those limits.

The reading time estimate uses 238 words per minute, the average adult silent-reading speed found in a large 2019 meta-analysis, while speaking time uses 130 wpm, a comfortable presentation pace — handy for timing a 5-minute speech (about 650 words) or a wedding toast. The keyword density table filters out about 50 common English stopwords ("the", "and", "with"…) and shows your top 10 substantive words with counts and percentages, a quick way to catch repetitive phrasing or check that your target keyword appears naturally (most SEO writers aim for roughly 1–2%).

Word Counter FAQ

No. All counting and keyword analysis runs locally in your browser, so essays, work documents and confidential drafts never leave your device.
It uses Unicode-aware matching, so accented letters, non-English alphabets, numbers and hyphenated or apostrophe words (like "don't" or "well-known") each count correctly as one word.
Reading time uses 238 words per minute — the average adult silent-reading speed from a large 2019 meta-analysis. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, a comfortable presentation pace.
About 650 words at a typical 130 words-per-minute speaking pace. A 10-minute speech is roughly 1,300 words and a 3-minute toast about 390.
An X (Twitter) post is 280 characters for standard accounts. For SEO, Google shows about 60 characters of a title tag and roughly 155–160 characters of a meta description before truncating.
Keyword density is how often a word appears as a percentage of total words. Most SEO writers aim for roughly 1–2% for a target keyword — the top-10 table here flags anything you may be over-repeating.
Sentences are segments ending in a period, question mark, exclamation point or ellipsis that contain text. Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by line breaks.

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