Word Counter

Every platform counts differently. Essay limits almost always mean words, social posts mean characters including spaces, and some application forms mean characters excluding them. Guessing which one applies is how people end up over a limit they thought they were under.

This counter shows all of them at once — words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and reading time — and, once there is enough text to measure honestly, a readability score for how hard the writing is to get through.

A word here is a run of characters separated by whitespace, which is the same rule word processors use and the one almost every published limit assumes. A hyphenated compound counts as one word; a number counts as a word; an em dash surrounded by spaces does not.

This matters at the margins. If you are close to a hard limit, check against the tool the person reading will use rather than against a rule of thumb.

The score is Flesch Reading Ease, which combines two things: how long your sentences are, and how many syllables your words have. Both are proxies for effort. It runs from 0 to 100, and higher is easier — most general-audience writing sits between 60 and 70.

The Flesch–Kincaid grade level converts the same inputs into US school years, so a grade of 9 means a typical fourteen-year-old could follow it. Neither number knows whether your writing is any good. They measure the mechanical difficulty of getting through a sentence, nothing more.

Because it would be false precision. Flesch Reading Ease divides by the number of sentences, so with three sentences in a sample one unusually long one can move the score by twenty points.

Reporting a number that unstable would be worse than reporting nothing, so below a hundred words the tool says so plainly instead of showing a figure you should not act on.

The score improves when sentences get shorter and words get simpler, which is genuinely useful feedback for dense writing. It is also easy to game by chopping every sentence in half, and prose optimised that way reads like a fire drill.

Treat a low score as a prompt to look for a sentence doing too much work, not as a target to hit. A technical document with unavoidable terminology will score badly and be perfectly clear to the people it is written for.