Word Counter

A word counter that answers the whole question

Most word counters tell you how many words you have typed and stop there. That is rarely the actual question. The real question is usually “will this fit”, “is this readable”, “have I repeated myself”, or “how long will this take to read out loud” – and answering those needs more than one number.

This one counts as you type, with no button to press and nothing uploaded anywhere. Every figure updates on the keystroke, including the ones further down the page.

What gets counted

• Words and unique words – the second number tells you how much of your vocabulary is actually different.
• Characters, with and without spaces – the distinction matters for meta descriptions, ad copy and anything with a hard field limit.
• Sentences, paragraphs and lines.
• Syllables, which is what readability formulas are built on.
• Pages, at the standard 250 words per double-spaced page.
• Longest, shortest and average sentence, plus average word length.
• Reading time at 225 words a minute, speaking time at 130 for a script or presentation, and handwriting time at 20.

Seven ways to change case

Retyping a heading because it is in the wrong case is a waste of a minute you will spend several times a week. Paste it, click once, copy it back.

• Sentence case – capitalises the first letter of each sentence and fixes a lowercase “i” on the way through.
• lower case and UPPER CASE – the obvious two.
• Capitalised Each Word – a capital on every word without exception.
• Title Case – the convention used for headlines and book titles, where small joining words such as “and”, “of” and “the” stay lowercase unless they open or close the title. This is the one you want for anything you publish.
• aLtErNaTiNg and iNVERSE – for when you need them.

Every change is undoable, so you can try one, look at it, and step back if it is wrong.

Cleaning up text that arrived badly

Text copied out of a PDF, an email or a spreadsheet usually needs the same four repairs, and doing them by hand is miserable. One click each:

• Extra spaces – collapses runs of spaces and tabs, and trims the ends of every line.
• Line breaks – joins hard-wrapped text back into flowing paragraphs, which is the fix for anything pasted out of a PDF.
• Blank lines – removes the empty lines between every line that some exports leave behind.
• Duplicate lines – keeps the first of each repeated line and drops the rest, in the original order.

Staying inside a limit

Pick a target and a meter appears, showing how much room is left and turning amber then red as you approach and pass it. The presets are the limits that actually come up in practice:

• 60 characters – roughly where Google truncates a title tag.
• 160 characters – a meta description, and also a single SMS.
• 280 characters – a post on X.
• 30 and 90 characters – Google Ads headlines and descriptions.
• Any number you like, in words or characters, for a brief with a word count attached.

Readability, explained rather than scored

Two numbers are shown. Flesch reading ease runs from 0 to 100, where 60 and above is plain English most people read comfortably and anything under 30 is heavy going. Flesch-Kincaid grade level translates the same calculation into years of schooling.

Both come from the same two inputs: how long your sentences are, and how many syllables your words have. That is worth knowing, because it tells you exactly how to move the number – shorten a sentence, or swap a long word for a short one. Nothing else affects it.

Underneath, the sentence length mix shows how your sentences are distributed across six bands, from single words to forty-plus. A wall of same-length sentences reads flat even when the score is good, and this is the chart that shows it. Good writing varies.

Keyword density without the noise

Your most used words and phrases are listed with counts and percentages, for one, two and three word phrases. Common words such as “the” and “and” are filtered out by default, because a list topped by articles tells you nothing; switch the filter off if you want the raw frequency.

This is a quick way to catch a word you have leaned on too heavily, which is far more common in drafts than people expect. If you need the same analysis run against a live page, including where each phrase sits in the title and headings, use the keyword density checker instead.

Nothing is stored

There is no account, no upload and no autosave. The text lives in your browser’s memory and nowhere else, which is deliberate: a word counter should not be holding on to your unpublished draft. The trade-off is that closing the tab loses it, so copy the text out or download the .txt file when you are done.