Word Counter

Words or characters — which budget am I writing to?

Different platforms cap different things, and getting it wrong is the difference between a post that publishes and one that gets truncated. As a rule of thumb: social posts and SEO snippets are character-limited, while essays, articles and reports are word-limited.

Reading time vs speaking time

Two paces matter, and they are very different:

• Reading time assumes silent reading at roughly 200-240 words per minute — the adult average (the 238 wpm figure comes from Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis). Technical or academic prose is often read 30-50% slower.
• Speaking time assumes reading aloud at roughly 130 words per minute — slower because of breathing, pauses and enunciation. This is the number you want when you are timing a speech, a presentation, a podcast intro or a voice-over. A 1,300-word script is about a 10-minute talk.

Keyword density, explained

Keyword density is how often a word appears as a percentage of the total words. Writers and SEOs use it for two things: catching unintentional repetition (“I used however nine times”), and checking that the term they are actually trying to rank for shows up enough — but not too much.

• Target keyword: around 1-2% of total words is the modern safe range.
• Over ~3%: reads as keyword stuffing and can hurt rather than help.
• Stopwords removed: filler words (the, and, of, to…) are excluded so the list reflects the words that carry meaning, not grammar glue.

Density is a diagnostic, not a target to game: write naturally first, then use the panel to sanity-check.

Readability: the Flesch score

The Flesch Reading Ease score rates how easy your text is to read on a 0-100 scale — higher is easier. It is computed from average sentence length and average syllables per word, so long sentences and long words both push the score down.

Aim for 60-70 for web and marketing copy; news outlets often target around 70-80. The companion grade level (a Flesch-Kincaid estimate) translates the same inputs into a U.S. school grade. Both are estimates — syllable counting is approximate, especially for names and loanwords — so treat them as a guide, not a verdict.

Counting rules that vary

• Hyphenated words: well-known counts as 1 word under whitespace rules, 2 under strict alphanumeric tokens. This tool treats a hyphenated compound as a single word.
• Numbers: 2026 counts as a word in most word processors.
• Emoji: counted as 1 character each but not a word. Some character-limit systems (like SMS, and X for certain ranges) count an emoji as 2 or more characters.
• URLs: counted as a single word by default; note that X counts every link as a flat 23 characters regardless of its real length.

Sentence heuristic caveats

Sentences are tricky because Dr., e.g., U.S.A. all contain periods without ending a sentence. The counter uses an end-punctuation heuristic that handles most prose well, but it is not perfect. For dissertation-critical counts, proofread the number.