Softonic

Text Statistics

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This tool runs a quick structural audit on whatever text you paste: characters with and without spaces, word count, sentence count, paragraph count, syllable count, and average words per sentence. It is built for writers checking length limits, editors spotting run-on sentences, and students verifying essay requirements without opening a word processor.

How to analyse a piece of text

  1. 1

    Paste your text

    Drop in anything from a tweet to a 10,000-word draft: the analyser runs on the full string.

  2. 2

    Hit analyze

    The tool splits words with a Unicode-aware regex, so accents and apostrophes count correctly. It relies on spaces, so the word count fits space-separated languages best.

  3. 3

    Read the breakdown

    You get seven lines: character totals, word count, sentences, paragraphs, syllables and average sentence length.

  4. 4

    Iterate

    Edit the text and rerun to see the deltas as you tighten or expand the piece.

What each metric tells you

Metric Why it matters
Characters with spaces Hard limit for tweets, SMS, meta descriptions
Characters without spaces What most word-count-by-character billing uses
Words Length vs brief, pacing vs audience
Sentences Density; too few = run-ons, too many = choppy
Paragraphs Structure; web copy breathes around every 3 - 5 sentences
Syllables Input for readability formulas like Flesch-Kincaid
Average words per sentence 14 - 20 reads naturally; 25+ starts to tire the reader

Rules the counter uses

  • Words: matched by [\p{L}\p{N}']+, so don't, 20th and café all count as one word.
  • Sentences: any run of ., ! or ? counts as one boundary. This overcounts with acronyms like U.S.A. and does not recognise the full-width 。, ！ or ？ used in Chinese and Japanese, so those languages register as a single sentence.
  • Paragraphs: separated by a blank line (two consecutive line breaks).
  • Syllables: a lightweight heuristic, strip trailing e, then count vowel groups. It is within ~5% of manual counts for English and is the same approach most readability libraries use.

Tips

  • Aim for an average sentence length below 20 words for web copy.
  • If your syllable count divided by word count exceeds 1.8, consider swapping polysyllabic words for shorter synonyms.
  • Paragraph count of 1 on a long piece is almost always a sign you forgot to press Enter.

Frequently Asked Questions

Character, word, sentence and paragraph counts work fine in any language with whitespace and Latin-like punctuation. The syllable count is English-biased and will be inaccurate for other languages.

Abbreviations with periods (Dr., e.g., U.S.A.) inflate the count. If that matters, strip or replace them before analysing.

Sentence length is one input to readability formulas but not the whole story. Flesch-Kincaid, for example, also weighs syllables per word.

No hard cap, but very long documents (over ~200 KB) may take a moment to process.

Your text is sent to our server to run the counts and is not shared with any third-party service. It is processed only to return your statistics.

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