Word Counter

Paste text in and get a live word count, character count, reading time, keyword density and a sentence-length breakdown, updated on every keystroke. Nothing is uploaded — the whole analysis runs in your browser.

How to use it

1. Paste or type your text into the box.
2. Read the word and character counts above the box, updated live.
3. Check reading time and speaking time — adjust the words-per-minute figure if your audience reads faster or slower than average.
4. Scroll to the keyword density table to see which words you are repeating most, stopwords excluded.
5. Check the sentence-length bands if you are editing for readability.

Why keyword density needs a stopword list

Every naive word-frequency tool produces the same useless output: “the” at the top, “a” close behind, “and” in third. That happens because English function words are, definitionally, the most frequent words in any text — they carry no topical information, so a raw frequency count buries the words that do.

This tool filters against a list of roughly 90 common English stopwords before ranking, so the table shows the nouns, verbs and adjectives an SEO writer or an editor actually cares about. The percentage figure is still calculated against the total word count including stopwords, because that matches what a reader scanning the raw text would estimate by eye — a density relative to only the filtered set would overstate every number.

Reading time is a range, not a fact

200 words per minute is a commonly cited average for adult silent reading, but real reading speed varies by a factor of two or three depending on text difficulty, familiarity with the subject, and the reader’s own habits. Technical writing with unfamiliar vocabulary reads slower than a casual blog post at the same word count.

That is why the words-per-minute figure here is editable rather than fixed. If you know your audience — a technical readership, a children’s book, a skim-reading executive summary — set the rate accordingly and the estimate becomes far more useful than a generic 200.

Sentence-length bands, and why the splitter is imperfect

Sentences are grouped into short (10 words or fewer), medium (11-20) and long (over 20), the bands most style guides use when flagging a paragraph that has become hard to read. A long-sentence-heavy paragraph is not automatically wrong, but a page where every sentence is long tends to lose readers.

The sentence splitter itself is a regex heuristic, not a true parser: it treats a run of terminal punctuation (., !, ?) as a sentence boundary. “Mr. Smith left the room.” will occasionally be counted as two sentences by a naive splitter — this one treats repeated terminators as one boundary to reduce that, but a perfect boundary detector needs a dictionary of abbreviations, which is out of scope for a client-side tool. The counts are accurate enough to guide an edit; they are not a formal linguistic analysis.

What it does not do

It does not check grammar, spelling, or style beyond sentence length — this is a counter, not an editor. It has no opinion on ideal word count for SEO, because the right length depends entirely on the topic and the competing pages, not on a fixed number this tool could print. Unicode text (CJK, Arabic, emoji) counts by JavaScript’s definition of a “word” via whitespace splitting, which does not match how those scripts are typically counted natively.

Typical word counts by content type

Content type	Typical range
Tweet / X post	1–70 words
Meta description	20–25 words
Blog introduction	40–80 words
Blog post (standard)	800–1,500 words
Long-form guide	2,000–4,000 words
Cover letter	250–400 words
Wedding speech	500–750 words (3–5 minutes spoken)

Reading time at different speeds

Word count	At 130 wpm (speaking)	At 200 wpm (reading)	At 300 wpm (fast reading)
500	4 minutes	3 minutes	2 minutes
1,000	8 minutes	5 minutes	3 minutes
2,000	15 minutes	10 minutes	7 minutes
5,000	38 minutes	25 minutes	17 minutes