WORD COUNTER: Free Online Character and Word Count Tool

Count words, characters without spaces and lines in real time. Check top keyword density, reading & speaking time and reading level.

Counts update in real time as you type or paste. Your text is processed entirely in your browser — it is never uploaded or stored.

Statistics

0
Characters
0
Non Blank Characters
0
Words
0
Spaces
0
Sentences
0
Lines
0
Not Empty Lines
0.0
Pages

Reading & Speaking

N/A
Flesch reading ease score
0 min
Reading time — 200 words/min
0 minutes 0 seconds
Speaking time — 150 words/min

Top Keywords

  • Keep typing to see top keywords…

Social Media Limits

Facebook 0 / 250
X 0 / 280
Google 0 / 300

How this counter counts

What counts as a word

Any run of characters between spaces counts, provided it contains at least one letter or number. A lone dash, bullet or ... is punctuation, not a word, so pasting a bulleted list does not inflate the count.

Characters vs non-blank characters

Characters counts everything you typed, spaces and line breaks included. Non-blank characters strips the whitespace out — use that number when a form says “1,000 characters or fewer” and you want the strictest reading.

Sentences, lines and pages

Sentences come from full stops, question marks and exclamation marks, so “Really?!” is one sentence while an abbreviation adds one. Lines follow your line breaks, “Not empty lines” ignores the blank ones, and Pages assumes 500 words a page.

What the reading scores mean

Flesch score Label shown here Usually described as
90–100Very EasyPlain conversation, about 5th-grade reading
80–89EasyEveryday prose, about 6th grade
70–79Fairly EasyChatty blog writing, about 7th grade
60–69StandardNewspaper and business writing, 8th–9th grade
50–59Fairly DifficultTrade and academic prose, 10th–12th grade
30–49DifficultAcademic writing, college level
0–29Very DifficultLegal or technical writing, college graduate

The score is Flesch Reading Ease, the classic 206.835 − 1.015 × (words ÷ sentences) − 84.6 × (syllables ÷ words) formula. Syllables are estimated by counting vowel groups, which is right most of the time and wrong on words like queue, so treat the number as a rough guide rather than a grade. The formula also assumes every sentence ends with punctuation: text with no full stops is measured as one enormous sentence and scores far harsher than it deserves.

Reading time assumes 200 words a minute and speaking time 150 words a minute, the usual pace for a clear presentation. Top keywords ignore common words such as the, and and of, so what is left is closer to the actual subject. Keyword density is a blunt instrument — search engines have not ranked pages by repetition for years — so use it to catch accidental over-repetition rather than to hit a target.

Frequently asked questions

Every counter draws the line in a slightly different place. Here a word must contain a letter or number, hyphens keep words joined (well-known counts once), and lines of symbols do not count at all. Word processors also differ over what to include — footnotes, headers and text boxes are counted by some and ignored by others. A difference of a few words is normal; a difference of hundreds usually means one tool is counting a part of the document the other is not.

Numbers count as words; bare emoji do not, because they contain no letter or number. They do affect the character count, and an emoji usually adds two characters rather than one — JavaScript measures string length in UTF-16 units, so anything above the basic range counts twice.

By punctuation: full stops, question marks and exclamation marks. That means an abbreviation such as e.g. or a decimal such as 0.5 counts as a sentence ending, and text with no punctuation at all is counted as a single sentence. It is a useful estimate, not a grammar engine.

It depends who you are writing for. General web writing usually sits in the 60s; instructions and forms do better above 70; academic writing is often in the 30s and 40s by design. The useful move is not to chase a score but to stay consistent, then look at the long sentences the score is complaining about.

No. The counting happens in your browser and your text never leaves the page — there is no server request behind any of the numbers, and this page loads no third-party scripts at all — which is why it works fine with an ad blocker on.

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