Word Counter and Readability Checker

How to use the word counter

Type or paste text into the box, or open or drop files: plain text, Markdown, HTML, Word (.docx) or OpenDocument (.odt). Every count updates as you type. Open several files at once to see each file’s count and the total.

How each number is counted

• Words are runs of letters or digits. Apostrophes, hyphens, dots, slashes and underscores inside a word keep it together, so don’t, well-known, e.g., and/or, 3.5, 1,000 and example.com are one word each. A web address or email address is one word. Punctuation, symbols and emoji on their own are not words.
• Chinese and Japanese count one word per Han, Hiragana or Katakana character, as word processors do. Thai, Lao, Khmer and Burmese, which are written without spaces, are split into words with your browser’s dictionary.
• Characters counts what a reader sees as one character, so an emoji with a skin tone or a letter with a separate accent mark counts once. Spaces and line breaks are included; Characters (no spaces) leaves out all whitespace.
• Sentences end with . ? ! or … followed by a space, or with 。！？ in Chinese and Japanese. A full stop does not end a sentence after a title such as Dr. or Mrs., after an initial such as J., after No. or fig. when a number follows, or when the next word starts with a lower-case letter, as after e.g. A blank line also ends a sentence, so a heading counts as one.
• Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by at least one blank line.

Opening documents

From a .docx or .odt file the counter reads the main text, text boxes, footnotes and endnotes, and skips headers, footers and comments. With tracked changes it counts the document as if every change were accepted: deleted text is left out and inserted text is counted. In Markdown files the formatting marks, link addresses and front matter are removed first. Old .doc, PDF and password-protected files cannot be read; copy their text instead.

Readability scores

Flesch Reading Ease is 206.835 − 1.015 × words per sentence − 84.6 × syllables per word. The Flesch-Kincaid grade, 0.39 × words per sentence + 11.8 × syllables per word − 15.59, turns the same two ratios into a US school grade. Scores are kept between 0 and 100, and grades at 0 or above. Both formulas were made for English, so they are only shown when most words are in the Latin alphabet.

Syllables are estimated by rules (vowel groups, a silent final e, endings such as -ed and -le), not looked up in a dictionary. They match the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary for about 95% of the 19,000 most common English words, and names and abbreviations are the usual misses. Scores from fewer than 100 words swing a lot.

Keyword density

The table lists the most frequent words and two- or three-word phrases. Density is how often a keyword appears × its number of words ÷ all words, so a two-word phrase used 5 times in 500 words has 2%. Phrases never run across sentences or punctuation. Ignore common words hides words such as the, and or with, and phrases that start or end with one.

Reading and speaking time

Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed for adults reading non-fiction in English (Brysbaert, 2019, a meta-analysis of 190 studies). Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, a typical pace for a talk or podcast.