Word Counter & Readability Analyser
Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs as you type, with reading and speaking time, Flesch readability scores and keyword density. Useful for hitting a word limit, sizing an article before you write it, or finding the paragraph that quietly became unreadable.
- Price:
- Free, no sign-up
- Data:
- Processed locally
- Reviewed:
Interactive word counter
Your text
Input DataCounts update as you type — nothing is sent anywhere
Reading speed
Parameters & SettingsReadability
Results & OutputFlesch Reading Ease and grade level
Keyword density
Results & OutputWhat the text is actually about
Add some text to see which terms dominate.
How long does it take to read 1,000 words?
About four minutes at the average silent reading speed of 238 words per minute, closer to seven minutes for dense technical material, and around eight minutes read aloud. Set the words-per-minute control to match your actual audience rather than trusting a single average.
How to use the word counter
- Paste or type: Counts update live as you write — nothing to click.
- Set your reading speed: Adjust words per minute if your audience reads faster or slower than average.
- Check readability: Read the Flesch score and grade level, with the longest sentences flagged.
- Review keyword density: See which terms dominate, with stop words filtered out.
How the word counter works
The readability formulas
Flesch Reading Ease = 206.835 − 1.015 × (words / sentences) − 84.6 × (syllables / words). Higher is easier, on a scale where 100 is very simple and 0 is very dense.
Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level = 0.39 × (words / sentences) + 11.8 × (syllables / words) − 15.59, giving the US school grade needed to read the text comfortably.
Syllable counting
English syllable counting has no exact algorithm. The heuristic here counts vowel groups, drops a silent trailing e, handles common endings like -le and -ed, and guarantees at least one syllable per word. It is accurate to within a few percent on ordinary prose, which is well within the noise of the formulas themselves.
Using the scores honestly
Both formulas reward short sentences and short words, and both are blind to structure, vocabulary difficulty and logic. You can score a text beautifully while saying nothing. Use them as a flag for accidental density — a spike in average sentence length usually marks a paragraph worth rewriting — and not as a target to optimise.
Word Counter — frequently asked questions
Word count divided by words per minute. 238 wpm is the measured average for silent reading of English prose; technical material runs nearer 150, and speaking aloud is closer to 130. Adjust the setting to match your actual audience rather than trusting a single default.
General web writing aims for 60-70, which corresponds to roughly an eighth-to-ninth-grade reading level. Below 30 is dense academic prose. Journalism typically lands around 65. The score is a rough instrument — it measures sentence and word length, not whether your argument is clear.
By terminal punctuation, with common abbreviations, decimals, ellipses and initials excluded so a sentence containing Dr. Smith and 1.5m counts as one sentence rather than four.
No. Every count and score is computed locally as you type, so drafts, client work and unpublished writing stay entirely on your machine.
Official resources & government references
Verified references, primary standards specifications, and official publications governing the rules and calculations implemented in this tool:
Unicode Standard Annex #29: Unicode Text Segmentation
The international standard specifying grapheme cluster, word, and sentence boundary determination across human scripts.
W3C Internationalization (i18n): Word Boundaries Across Languages
Official web guidelines on multilingual tokenization and linguistic typography boundaries.
Important Disclaimer
Readability indices and reading pace estimations are mathematical approximations based on the Flesch-Kincaid formulas. They provide stylistic indicators of syllable density, not qualitative assessments of comprehension.