Word Counter & Readability Checker
Count words, characters, sentences and reading time as you type, then check your Flesch score, grade level, keyword density and social media limits. Free, and your text never leaves your browser.
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Put a working Word Counter on your blog, class page or intranet. It runs in your visitor’s browser, needs no account and has no ads. Paste this code into any page that accepts HTML.
How to use Word Counter
- 1. Type or paste your text into the box, or press ✨ Sample text to try it. Counts update as you type, and your draft is saved in this browser so a refresh won’t lose it.
- 2. Read the stats: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, unique words, reading and speaking time, plus syllables and average sentence length. Set a 🎯 Word goal to track progress.
- 3. Open the tabs: 📖 Readability for Flesch Reading Ease and five grade-level scores, 📏 Limits for X, Threads, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, SEO and SMS, 🔑 Keywords for word and phrase density, and 🖍 Style check for long sentences and possible passive voice.
- 4. Edit until you hit your target, use 🧹 Clean up to strip extra spaces and invisible characters, then copy your text or download the stats as a .txt report or .csv file.
Frequently asked questions
Is this word counter free, and is my text private?
Yes. It’s free with no sign-up, and all counting happens in your browser. Your text isn’t uploaded to a server. To survive a refresh, your draft is saved only in this browser’s local storage; press Clear to delete it. There’s no word limit beyond what your browser can handle.
How are the readability scores calculated?
The tool uses the standard published formulas: Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch–Kincaid Grade, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman–Liau and the Automated Readability Index. Syllables are estimated with a dictionary of exceptions plus spelling rules, which matched the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary on 99.9% of words in our tests. Scores are designed for English and are most reliable above about 100 words.
What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score?
Higher is easier. 60–70 is plain English, readable by 8th and 9th graders, and most web pages, emails and marketing copy aim for 60 or more. Below 30 reads like academic or legal text. The consensus grade level is the average of the five grade-level formulas; around grade 7–9 suits a general audience.
How are characters counted for X, Instagram, TikTok and SMS?
X counts every link as 23 characters and emoji or Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters as 2, and the tool follows that. Bluesky counts graphemes. Instagram allows 2,200 caption characters and, since December 2025, 5 hashtags. TikTok’s commonly cited caption limit is 4,000. An SMS holds 160 GSM-7 characters or 70 if any character needs Unicode, and long texts split into 153 or 67-character parts.
How does it count words, sentences and paragraphs?
Words are groups of characters separated by spaces or dashes that contain a letter or number, so hyphenated words and contractions count once, and each Chinese or Japanese character counts as a word. A sentence ends at a period, question mark or exclamation point, but abbreviations like Dr., e.g. and U.S. don’t end one, and a line with no end punctuation, like a heading, counts as its own sentence. Each non-empty line is a paragraph. Reading time uses 238 words per minute and speaking time 140.
How do keyword density and the style check work?
Density is how many times a word or phrase appears divided by your total words. You can switch between single words and 2- or 3-word phrases and hide common words like “the” and “and.” The style check highlights sentences over 25 words and possible passive voice, such as “was written.” It’s a quick heuristic, not a grammar checker, so some phrases like “was tired” get flagged too.