Word counter
Type something and the most frequent words show up here.
Type something and the most frequent words show up here.
One pass over your text gives every count at once: words, characters with and without spaces, letters, vowels, consonants, digits, sentences, paragraphs, lines, unique words and estimated syllables. A word is a run of letters or digits, so "well-known" counts once. Reading time uses 238 words a minute; speaking time 130.
How to use it
Reading speed is quoted far too confidently elsewhere. Brysbaert’s 2019 review put silent reading of non-fiction at 238 words a minute on average, with a range across studies from about 175 to 300 depending on the reader and the material. Treat any reading-time badge, this one included, as an order of magnitude rather than a promise.
The counts that look interchangeable are not. Characters include spaces, digits and punctuation; letters do not, so "Hello, world!" is thirteen characters and ten letters. Lines are actual line breaks, blank ones included, while paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line — comparing the two tells you how many blank lines a document carries, and it is also why a draft written with single line breaks reports as one paragraph. Sentences are found by terminating punctuation followed by a space, which is a rule that abbreviations defeat: "Dr." and "a.m." each add one.
Two figures are estimates and say so. Syllables are counted from vowel groups, which is right for most ordinary words and wrong for a stubborn minority — "business" and "poem" defeat every spelling-based rule, and dictionaries themselves disagree because syllable division follows pronunciation. Y is counted as a consonant, the usual convention, although it plainly does vowel duty in "rhythm".
The character table is the old letter-frequency exercise. English prose runs about 12 percent E, then T, A, O, I and N, which together account for roughly 45 percent of all letters; a simple substitution cipher usually gives up its E to that fact alone. Spaces normally top the table and are shown as a labelled row rather than an invisible one; the thirty commonest characters are listed.
What people use it for
- Counting the words in an essay against a limit
- Counting letters rather than characters for a crossword or a word game
- Splitting a word into vowels and consonants
- Counting lines in a pasted list or log
- Counting paragraphs and sentences in a draft
- Checking the syllables in a line of a haiku
- Ranking which characters appear most often in a text
- Checking a headline or caption against a platform limit
- Getting the word count that a page-count estimate starts from
Questions
A run of letters or digits, which may contain apostrophes and hyphens. So "well-known" and "it’s" each count as one word.
Characters include spaces, digits and punctuation; letters do not. "Hello, world!" is thirteen characters and ten letters.
On terminating punctuation — a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis — followed by a space or the end of the text.
Abbreviations. "Dr." and "a.m." look like sentence endings to any punctuation-based rule, and there is no way to tell them apart without a dictionary.
A blank line. Single line breaks inside a block do not start a new paragraph, which is why a draft written that way reports as one.
Yes, in the line count. The paragraph count excludes them, so the gap between the two figures is how many blank lines you have.
It counts line terminators rather than lines, so a file with no trailing newline reports one fewer than an editor shows.
No, it is counted as a consonant, which is the usual convention. It genuinely acts as a vowel in words like "rhythm", so adjust by hand where that matters.
Good on ordinary words and wrong on a stubborn minority. It reads vowel groups, so "business" and "poem" are the kind of word it gets wrong, and dictionaries disagree about some words anyway.
E at about 12 percent, then T, A, O, I and N. Those six are roughly 45 percent of all letters, which the character table will show on any long enough text.
For a simple substitution, often yes: the symbol appearing about 12 percent of the time is probably E. It does nothing against a polyalphabetic cipher.
About four double spaced or two single spaced, at 12 point with normal margins. The standard manuscript page is 250 words. This page gives you the word count; the reading time calculator divides it by a words-per-page figure you choose.
Because "the" and "of" would top every list. Around a hundred function words are excluded, along with anything under three letters.
It shows what a piece is actually about. As an SEO target it is obsolete: writing to a density figure produces text that reads badly and ranks no better.
Title tags are truncated around 60 characters in Google results and meta descriptions around 155, both approximate because the real limit is pixel width. The social limits are exact.
No. Counting happens in this page, which is the point: you can paste a draft nobody else should see.