Word counter with reading time and keyword density

How to count words in your text

1. Paste or type your text into the box. You can also drag a .txt, .md or .csv file straight onto it, or use the Open file button.
2. Every figure updates as you type — words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, lines, reading time and speaking time.
3. Set the reading speed that matches your audience. 238 words per minute is the average for adult silent reading; use 150 for dense technical writing and 350 for skimming.
4. Check the length panel if the text is going somewhere with a limit: a post, a meta description, a title tag or an SMS.
5. Copy or download the full report when you need to record the numbers — for a client brief, a submission form or a content audit.

What counts as a word, a sentence and a paragraph

Word counters disagree with each other more often than people expect, so here are the exact rules this one uses. A word is a run of non-space characters that contains at least one letter or digit. Hyphenated compounds such as “state-of-the-art” count as one word, contractions such as “don’t” count as one, and a stray bullet or dash on its own counts as none. This matches the behaviour of Microsoft Word and Google Docs closely enough that the numbers agree on normal prose.

A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis that is followed by whitespace or the end of the text — and also at a blank line, so headings and list items are counted. Abbreviations such as “Dr.”, “etc.” and initials such as “J. R. R.” are recognised and do not split a sentence. A paragraph is a block of consecutive non-empty lines; blank lines separate one paragraph from the next.

Reading time, speaking time and where the numbers come from

Reading time is simply words divided by a reading speed. The 238 words-per-minute default comes from Marc Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies of adult silent reading of English prose; the same paper puts read-aloud speed at about 183 wpm. Presentation and voice-over pacing is slower still, so speaking time here uses 140 wpm, which is a comfortable conference-talk rhythm and close to what audiobook narrators average.

Treat both as planning estimates, not guarantees. Technical material with code, tables or unfamiliar terminology reads far slower than narrative prose, and a script you will read aloud with pauses can easily take 20% longer than the figure shown.

Typical word counts by format

Using keyword density sensibly

The keyword table ranks the most frequent terms and shows each one’s share of all counted terms. Switch the phrase length to two or three words to see the phrases a search engine can actually match — single-word density is a blunt instrument, and “content marketing” tells you much more than “content” and “marketing” separately.

Density is a diagnostic, not a target. If your main phrase sits between roughly 0.5% and 2.5% the copy usually reads naturally; if it is above 4% you are almost certainly repeating yourself in a way readers notice. Equally useful is what the table does not contain: if the terms you are trying to rank for are absent from the top twenty, the page is probably about something else.

Readability scores

The Flesch Reading Ease score combines average sentence length and average syllables per word into a 0–100 figure, where higher is easier. Plain English for a general audience scores 60–70; technical documentation often lands in the 30s. The Flesch–Kincaid grade level converts the same inputs into a US school grade. Both indices only measure sentence and word length, so they cannot tell you whether the writing is clear — but a sudden drop in the score usually means a sentence has grown out of control.

Everything stays on your device

The counter is JavaScript running inside your browser tab. Your draft, your client’s confidential brief and your unpublished manuscript are never uploaded, logged or sent to an analytics service. You can load the page, switch off the network and keep working.