Word Counter
Paste or type your text to count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs instantly. Get reading and speaking time, a word goal tracker and keyword density — all calculated privately in your browser.
| # | Keyword | Count | Density |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your most frequent words will appear here. | |||
How This Word Counter Works
Accurate counts for essays, articles, SEO copy and code comments — in any language.
A word is any run of letters or digits, so contractions (“don't”), hyphenated words (“well-known”) and numbers (“3.14”) count as one word, while punctuation, emoji and symbols are ignored. Chinese and Japanese don't use spaces, so each Han, Hiragana or Katakana character counts as one word — the same convention Microsoft Word uses.
Characters are counted the way people see them: an emoji like 👩💻 or a flag 🇮🇳 is one character, even though it's made of several Unicode code points.
Reading time uses an average silent reading speed of 238 words per minute, and speaking time 150 words per minute — useful for blog posts, presentations, video scripts and speeches.
Keyword density shows the words and phrases you use most, as a percentage of all words. Turn on “Ignore common words” to skip filler like “the”, “and” and “of” and see what your text is really about.
Typical Word Counts
Common targets for writers, students and marketers.
| Type of text | Typical length | Reading time* |
|---|---|---|
| Tweet / social post | 25–50 words | < 15 sec |
| Product description | 150–300 words | ~1 min |
| College application essay | 250–650 words | 1–3 min |
| News article | 500–800 words | 2–4 min |
| Blog post (SEO) | 1,000–2,500 words | 4–11 min |
| 5-minute speech | ~750 words | 5 min spoken |
| Short story | 1,000–7,500 words | 4–32 min |
| Novel | 70,000–100,000 words | 5–7 hours |
* At 238 words per minute (silent reading) unless noted.
How to Use the Word Counter
Get your result in under ten seconds.
Add your text
Type directly, paste from Word or Google Docs, or load the example.
Read the stats
Words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, reading and speaking time update as you type.
Refine
Set a word goal, check keyword density and select any part of the text to count just that.
Why Use the Word Counter on Developers Web Tools
Fast, accurate and private — built for developers.
Instant & live
Every number updates as you type — even long documents stay smooth thanks to background processing.
Every language
Correct counts for accents, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese and Japanese, plus emoji.
Reading & speaking time
Know how long your post takes to read or your speech takes to deliver.
Word goal
Set a target and watch the progress bar fill up as you write.
Keyword density
Find over-used words and check your focus keyword for SEO — single words or 2–3 word phrases.
Private
Your text never leaves your browser and is not saved anywhere.
Frequently Asked Questions
Any continuous run of letters or numbers is one word. Contractions and hyphenated words count once, numbers like 2,500 or 3.14 count once, and punctuation, symbols and emoji on their own don't count. Each Chinese or Japanese character counts as one word.
Every tool handles edge cases slightly differently — for example, whether “e-mail”, “—” dashes, URLs or numbers count as words. Differences are usually within 1%. This counter follows the rules above consistently for all languages.
Words divided by 238, the average adult silent reading speed found in a large 2019 meta-analysis. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, a comfortable pace for presentations.
It's how often a word or phrase appears as a percentage of all words. There's no magic number for SEO — write naturally. If your main keyword is above about 3%, the text may read as repetitive or “keyword-stuffed”.
Yes. Select any part of the text with your mouse or keyboard and the “Selected” counter in the bar below shows its word and character count.
No. All counting happens in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, and nothing is kept after you close the page.
No hard limit. Large documents are analyzed in a background thread so typing stays smooth; above about 3 million characters, counting switches to the Analyze button.