About this counter
A word counter for essays and abstracts, platform limits, and talks that must fit their slot: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, and how long the text takes to read silently or speak aloud. Once the text has a few sentences, a readability section appears beneath it—the Flesch Reading Ease score, the average sentence and word length, the longest sentence, and a histogram of sentence lengths: the mirror a writer glances at to see whether every sentence marches at the same pace. Everything updates live as you type or paste, and the draft is kept between visits.
Questions
What counts as a word?
Any run of characters separated by spaces or line breaks—so a hyphenated pair like well-worn is one word, and numbers count like words. This matches what most word processors report.
How are reading and speaking time estimated?
Reading time assumes about 225 words per minute of silent reading; speaking time assumes about 130 words per minute aloud—a comfortable pace for a talk or a lecture. Both are estimates, rounded to the nearest minute.
What is the difference between characters with and without spaces?
Characters counts everything you typed, including spaces and line breaks—this is what most platform limits mean by characters. Without spaces drops all whitespace and keeps only the visible marks.
What is the Flesch Reading Ease score?
A classic readability measure built from sentence length and syllables per word: the higher the score, the easier the text reads. Around 90 is very easy, 60–70 is plain prose, below 30 is dense academic writing. The page shows it once your text has at least three sentences.
How accurate are the readability numbers?
They are estimates. Syllables are counted with a standard English heuristic—vowel groups, silent endings—and the Flesch formula itself was designed for English, so treat the score as a mirror to glance at, not a grade, and expect it to wobble for other languages.
Is my text uploaded anywhere?
It is counted in the browser as you type, and kept in local storage so it survives a reload—it travels no further than your device.
More instruments: a blank page to write on, a comparison of two texts and a text cleaner—or see all of them.