By Tim King · Updated 19 September 2026

Word Counter

Character Count With and Without Spaces, Plus Flesch and Fog Scores

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How the Word Counter works

This word counter also shows characters, sentences and reading time. Paste or type your text and everything updates on the same keystroke — words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, reading and speaking time at whatever speed you set, six readability scores with the scale each one uses, the words or phrases you repeat most with their density, and how much room you have left against the tweet, meta title, meta description, Instagram and SMS limits. Nothing is uploaded; every count runs in your browser.

How the word counter counts

Every counter draws the word boundary somewhere slightly different, which is why the same document can be 998 words in one tool and 1,004 in another. Here a word is an unbroken run of letters or digits, optionally joined by an apostrophe, hyphen or dot, so "don't", "well-established", "COVID-19" and "example.com" are one word each and a lone dash is none. Letters are matched by Unicode category, so "café", "Москва" and "東京" count like English. Characters are whole characters, not UTF-16 units, so an emoji counts once. A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis, which over-counts abbreviations like "Dr." — a known and deliberate simplification. Paragraphs are separated by a blank line.

Character count with and without spaces

Characters are counted twice: once including spaces, line breaks and punctuation, which is what every platform limit uses, and once with all whitespace removed, which is what some translation and typesetting quotes are priced on. A 500-word English passage is typically about 3,000 characters with spaces and 2,500 without.

How many words is my essay?

The word count is the headline figure, and the table below converts it to pages for the usual double-spaced, 12-point layout so you can tell whether a page target has been met.

Words	Pages (double-spaced)	Pages (single-spaced)	Reading time at 238 wpm
250	1	0.5	1 min
500	2	1	2 min
1,000	4	2	4 min
1,500	6	3	6 min
2,000	8	4	8 min
3,000	12	6	13 min
5,000	20	10	21 min

Reading and speaking time

Reading defaults to 238 words per minute, the mean adult silent rate for English non-fiction from a 2019 meta-analysis; speaking defaults to 130, a presentation pace. Both are editable, and your own timed rate beats either default.

Readability score checker

All six use only sentence length, word length and syllable count. None of them reads your text, so a nonsense sentence of short words scores as easy prose. Use them to catch drift, not as a target to hit — splitting sentences in half improves every score without improving the writing. Syllables are estimated by counting vowel groups with English corrections, which trips on names and acronyms. W is words, S sentences, Syl syllables, L letters, and "complex" means a word of three or more syllables.

Flesch Reading Ease	Reads like	Approximate grade
90–100	Very easy, comics and children's books	5th grade
70–90	Easy, popular fiction	6th–7th grade
60–70	Plain English, most web writing	8th–9th grade
50–60	Fairly difficult, quality newspapers	10th–12th grade
30–50	Difficult, academic and technical	University
0–30	Very difficult, legal and scientific	Postgraduate

Flesch reading ease calculator

206.835 − 1.015 × (W ÷ S) − 84.6 × (Syl ÷ W). Runs 0–100 where higher is easier: 60–70 is plain English, 30 and below is dense academic or legal prose.

Flesch-Kincaid Grade

0.39 × (W ÷ S) + 11.8 × (Syl ÷ W) − 15.59. The same two ingredients converted to a US school grade, so 8.0 means an average eighth-grader could follow it.

Gunning fog index calculator

0.4 × ((W ÷ S) + 100 × (complex ÷ W)). Years of education needed on first reading. Newspapers sit near 12; anything above 17 is postgraduate.

SMOG

1.043 × √(complex × 30 ÷ S) + 3.1291. Also years of education, and the most accurate of the grade formulas for health material, but it was calibrated on 30-sentence samples and is unreliable on anything shorter.

Automated Readability Index

4.71 × (L ÷ W) + 0.5 × (W ÷ S) − 21.43. A US grade from letters per word instead of syllables, so it needs no syllable estimate and works on any script.

Coleman-Liau

0.0588 × L100 − 0.296 × S100 − 15.8, where L100 is letters per 100 words and S100 is sentences per 100 words. Another letter-based US grade, designed for machine scoring.

Keyword density checker

The table ranks the single words, two-word or three-word phrases you use most, with density as a share of all phrases of that length. Common function words — the, and, of — are excluded by default so every document does not produce the same list; count every word when checking whether a term appears often enough to be the page's actual subject. Phrases beat single words for technical writing, because the terms that carry meaning are compounds. Density is a diagnostic for repetition, not a ranking factor: there is no percentage to aim for.

Platform limits

The last table compares your character count, spaces included, against the tweet limit of 280, a meta title of about 60 characters before Google truncates it, a meta description of about 160, an Instagram caption of 2,200 and a single SMS of 160. Anything over is shown as how far over you are.

FAQ

Why does my word count differ from Microsoft Word?

Word treats some strings as single words that this counter splits, and it counts standalone symbols that this counter ignores. Differences of a few words per thousand are normal between any two tools. If you are near a hard limit, count with whichever tool your marker or editor will use.

Which readability score should I use?

Flesch Reading Ease for general web writing, where 60–70 is the usual target, and Flesch-Kincaid or Gunning Fog when someone asks for a grade level. SMOG is the standard for health and patient information but needs at least 30 sentences. If the scores disagree by more than a grade or two, the text probably has a few very long words or very long sentences skewing one formula.

What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score?

For general web writing, aim for 60–70, which is plain English an average adult reads without effort. Below 30 is dense professional or academic prose, and above 80 is simple enough for a young reader. What counts as good depends entirely on who you are writing for.

Can I trust the readability scores?

Only as a rough signal. Every formula measures sentence length and word length and nothing else, so none can judge whether your writing makes sense — and you can improve the score by chopping sentences up without making the text any clearer. Use them to spot drift, not as a target.

Is there an ideal keyword density?

No. Search engines stopped rewarding repetition long ago and penalise stuffed text, so any target percentage is obsolete advice. Use the table to catch a word you lean on too often, or to confirm the subject you think you wrote about is the subject the text actually repeats.

Does it handle other languages and emoji?

Yes for languages written with spaces and for accented Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts, which are matched by Unicode letter category rather than by the English alphabet. Emoji count as whole characters rather than as the two units a naive length check reports. Chinese, Japanese and Korean have no spaces between words, so the word count there is closer to a character count, and the syllable-based readability scores only make sense for English.