Word Counter

Counting words sounds trivial until you compare two tools and get different numbers. The definition used here is the same one Microsoft Word and Google Docs use: a word is any run of characters separated by whitespace. So "state-of-the-art" counts as one word, "e.g." counts as one, and a numeral like "2026" counts as one. Sentences are detected by terminal punctuation — a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by a space or the end of the text — and paragraphs by blank lines between blocks.

Character counts come in two flavours because different platforms count differently. The "characters" figure includes spaces and line breaks, which is what Twitter/X, SMS and most database field limits measure. "Characters without spaces" is what academic submissions and some publishing systems ask for. Meta descriptions, ad copy and bios almost always mean the with-spaces number.

Reading time is calculated at 225 words per minute, the middle of the range for adult silent reading of general prose. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, which is a comfortable presentation pace — faster than most people manage while also thinking, slower than an auctioneer. Use these as planning figures: a five-minute conference talk is roughly 650 words, and a "3 min read" blog post is around 675.

The keyword density panel counts how often each word appears as a percentage of the total, after stripping punctuation and removing about eighty common stop words. It exists for two different jobs. If you are writing for search, it tells you whether your target phrase actually appears in the text and whether you have overdone it — anything above roughly 3% for a single term reads as stuffed to both readers and search engines. If you are editing prose, it is a fast tic-detector: it will show you that you have used "actually" eleven times in nine hundred words, which is the kind of thing you stop noticing in your own drafts.

Everything runs locally in JavaScript. There is no upload, no autosave and no logging, so pasting an unpublished manuscript, a client contract or an internal memo carries no more risk than opening it in a text editor. Closing the tab discards the text entirely.