Word Counter

A word is a run of letters or numbers. Apostrophes, hyphens and dots inside a word keep it together, so don't, e-mail and 3.5 each count as one word. Punctuation, emoji and symbols on their own are not words. Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters are counted one character per word, because those languages don't separate words with spaces.

This tool counts characters the way people see them, so an emoji with a skin tone or a flag counts as one character. Some tools count the underlying code units instead, which counts many emoji as two or more. Line breaks and spaces count as characters in the main total; the no-spaces figure leaves out all whitespace.

Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, a common average for adults reading non-fiction on a screen. Speaking time assumes 150 words per minute, a comfortable pace for a presentation, podcast or video voice-over. Your own pace may be faster or slower.

It is a readability formula based on average sentence length and average syllables per word. Scores run from about 0 to 100, and higher is easier: 60 to 70 is plain English that most adults read easily. The Flesch-Kincaid grade turns the same inputs into a US school grade level. Syllables are estimated with a spelling rule rather than a dictionary, so treat both scores as an estimate. They are only shown for English text.

Keyword density is how often a word or phrase appears per 100 words of your text. It helps you spot words you repeat too much and check that your main topic is actually mentioned. There is no ideal percentage for search engines; write naturally and use the table to catch overuse.

Stop words are very common words such as the, and, is and of. With the filter on, they are left out of the single-word list, and phrases that start or end with one are skipped, so the table shows the words that carry meaning.

No. Everything is counted in your browser. Nothing is uploaded or stored.