Word Counter

What each number means

Every figure updates on each keystroke, and all counting happens in your browser.

• Words – runs of letters or digits. Hyphenated words such as well-known and numbers such as 2026 count as one, which matches Microsoft Word and Google Docs. Stray punctuation on its own is ignored.
• Characters – everything, including spaces, punctuation and line breaks. This is the figure that limits apply to on X (280), SMS (160 per segment), meta descriptions (about 155) and search titles (about 60).
• Characters without spaces – for forms and exam portals that state a limit “excluding spaces”.
• Sentences – split on full stops, question marks and exclamation marks followed by a space or line break. Abbreviations like Dr. or e.g. can add an extra sentence, so treat the figure as approximate.
• Paragraphs – blocks separated by a blank line. Single line breaks do not start a new paragraph.
• Unique words – distinct words after lowercasing, with the percentage of the total. A low ratio (under 40% in a long piece) usually means repetition worth fixing.
• Reading and speaking time – 225 and 150 words per minute respectively, rounded to the second.

Keywords and phrases

The keyword table lists the ten most frequent words after removing about 200 stop words (the, and, with, is and so on) and pure numbers, along with density, which is count divided by total words. The phrase table shows the five most repeated two-word combinations that contain no stop words and occur at least twice, which is a quick way to see whether a text is really about its stated topic.

For SEO writing, a main keyword density of roughly 0.5–2% is typical of natural text. Above 4% reads as stuffed, and search engines have penalised that for years. For essays and cover letters, the same table exposes tics: if very, really or important is in your top ten, cut most of them.

Worked example

Paste a 1,200-word blog draft and you might see:

Two actions follow directly: split the three longest paragraphs, and replace four or five instances of “budget” with a pronoun or synonym.

Common length targets

These are conventions, not rules, but they are what editors, examiners and platforms expect.

Practical tips

• Use Copy stats to paste the summary into a submission note or client email; it includes the keyword and phrase tables.
• For speeches, use the speaking-time figure and add 10–15% for pauses and audience reaction.
• Count characters without spaces for Indian government exam forms and many scholarship portals, which usually specify limits that way.
• Check unique-word percentage on AI-generated drafts. They often score low because models reuse the same abstract nouns; the Case Converter and Text Cleaner on this site will not fix that, but the AI Writing Pattern Checker will show you which words to replace.
• Character counts include invisible characters copied from web pages. If the number looks higher than expected, run the text through the Text Cleaner first.

Read next

• Readability Scores Explained: Flesch, Flesch-Kincaid and Gunning Fog — The formulas behind Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade and Gunning Fog, what scores mean for web, email and academic text, and how to improve them.
• How to Summarize Long Articles Fast (Without Losing the Point) — Extractive vs abstractive summarizing, how to check a summary for missing facts, bullets vs paragraphs, study-note workflows and coursework ethics.

Frequently asked questions