Word Counter
What it does
This free word counter gives you the word count of any text as you type or paste it. Alongside the count it shows characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, unique words, reading time and speaking time, the words you repeat most, and how the text measures up against the character limits for meta titles, meta descriptions, X posts, Google Ads and other places with a hard cap. It accepts plain text or HTML, and the Strip HTML option counts only the text a reader would see. Nothing is uploaded: the counting happens in your browser.
How to use the word counter
- Paste your text into the box above, or type straight into it. The word count and every other figure update as you go.
- Leave Strip HTML ticked if you copied from a web page or a CMS source view, so tags and attributes aren’t counted as words.
- Set the reading speed (220 words per minute by default) and the speaking speed (130 by default) to suit your audience.
- Read the structure panel for sentence and paragraph lengths, the keyword panel for the words you lean on, and the limits panel to see whether a title, description or post will fit.
- Use the copy button in the side rail to copy the headline numbers into a brief, a ticket or an email.
Reading time and speaking time
Reading time is the word count divided by a silent reading rate. The 220 wpm default suits an adult reading a familiar subject on screen. Technical or unfamiliar material reads nearer 150 to 180 wpm, and skimming runs past 300, so change the rate to fit the reader rather than trusting one number.
Speaking time uses a slower rate because people talk more slowly than they read. Around 130 wpm is a comfortable pace for a presentation or a best man’s speech; a nervous speaker goes faster, a careful one slower. A 5-minute talk is roughly 650 words at that pace, and a 10-minute talk about 1,300. If you are writing a script for a video or a podcast, read a paragraph aloud against a timer and put your own rate into the speaking box.
Character limits for titles, descriptions and posts
The limits panel compares the whole text against eight common caps. Paste just the piece you are checking (one title, one post) so the comparison means something.
- Meta title: about 60 characters. Google truncates by pixel width, so a title full of wide letters can be cut sooner. The SERP Preview shows the exact cut.
- Meta description: about 155 characters on desktop before the snippet is trimmed.
- X (Twitter) post: 280 characters for a standard account.
- SMS: 160 characters for one message in the standard character set. Longer texts are split and billed as several.
- Google Ads: 30 characters per headline and 90 per description.
- Instagram caption: 2,200 characters, though only the first line or two shows before “more”.
- LinkedIn post: 3,000 characters, with the preview cut after roughly the first three lines.
When the bar turns red the text is over the limit. For writing title and description tags from scratch, the Meta Tag Generator has the same length warnings built in.
Keyword density at a glance
The keyword panel lists the eight words that appear most often once common words such as “the” and “and” are removed, with each one’s share of the total word count. It’s a quick check that the page is about what you think it’s about, and a warning when one word starts to crowd the rest. For two- and three-word phrases, longer lists and the option to keep stop words, use the full Keyword Density Checker.
Common situations
You have written a long article and want to know whether it is the length the brief asked for. Paste it in and read the count and the reading time together. “A 7-minute read” sets expectations better than “1,500 words” when you describe it to someone else.
A freelancer has delivered a blog post against a 1,200-word brief and you want to check it without scrolling a document. Paste the content, check the count, then decide whether to send it back for expansion or accept it.
You are auditing a content set for thin pages. Google’s helpful-content updates have made thin pages more visible as a quality problem, so run the important pages through the counter. Anything well under 300 words is a candidate for expansion or merging into a stronger page.
You need a speech or video script to run to a set time. Write to the speaking time rather than the word count, and set the speaking rate to your own pace.
You are comparing your content with a competitor’s. Paste their article and yours into the same counter so both are measured by the same rules; different counters disagree by a few percent.
What you need to know
Word count is one of the simpler signals in SEO, and one of the most misread. It correlates with ranking without causing it. Pages that rank well tend to be longer because longer content covers more of what the searcher wants and has more room for internal links and supporting detail. Adding words to a thin page rarely improves its rank. Improving its depth and coverage does, and that usually brings more words with it.
Rough length bands for web content:
- Under 300 words: thin territory unless the topic resolves in a few sentences (a definition, a single fact, a contact page).
- 300 to 800 words: short-form. News posts, brief explanations, FAQ entries and glossary terms.
- 800 to 1,500 words: the default for a substantial blog post or article.
- 1,500 to 3,000 words: pillar content aimed at competitive topics.
- 3,000 words and over: comprehensive guides that try to cover a whole subject.
How each figure is counted:
Words are split on whitespace. Hyphenated compounds (well-known) count as one word, and numbers count as words.
Sentences end at ., ! or ? followed by a space or the end of the text. Abbreviations such as “Dr.” and “e.g.” can add false breaks, so the count is approximate but consistent.
Paragraphs are separated by a blank line. HTML paragraphs are counted from the rendered structure once the markup is stripped.
Characters are shown with and without spaces. The character limits use the count with spaces, which is how platforms measure them.
Unique words ignore case and punctuation, so “Count” and “count,” are the same word.
How many words should a sentence have?
The structure panel reports average sentence length, the longest sentence and how many sentences run past 25 words. Two UK references are worth knowing. The Plain English Campaign recommends an average of 15 to 20 words per sentence, and GOV.UK’s content guidance asks writers to look again at any sentence over 25 words to see whether it can be split.
An average is only an average. A page of 18-word sentences with no variation reads flat, and a good page mixes 6-word sentences with the odd 30-word one. If the long-sentence count is high, look for sentences joined with “and”, “which” or a semicolon, because those are usually two sentences sharing a full stop.
If you want to know how many words are in one sentence, paste only that sentence.
Paragraphs follow the same logic. Print often runs to 150 words or more per paragraph. On a phone that becomes a long block of text, which is why web copy usually keeps paragraphs to three or four sentences. The average paragraph figure shows whether a draft has drifted into walls of text.
Word length and what the average tells you
Average word length in everyday English prose sits at roughly four to five letters. The tool divides characters (without spaces) by words, so punctuation attached to a word is included and the figure reads slightly higher than a letters-only count.
The number is most useful when you compare drafts. If one version of a page averages 4.6 and the rewrite averages 5.4, the rewrite has drifted towards longer, more abstract vocabulary: “utilise” for “use”, “functionality” for “features”. Readability formulas such as Flesch Reading Ease work on the same two inputs, word length (measured in syllables) and sentence length, so bringing either down usually makes the text easier to read.
The longest-word figure is a character count. Anything over 20 characters in normal prose is almost always two words that lost their space in a copy and paste, or a URL that slipped into the text.
Checking word count in Google Docs and Word
You don’t always need to paste text out of your editor. In Google Docs, open Tools, then Word count (Ctrl+Shift+C on Windows, Cmd+Shift+C on Mac). Ticking “Display word count while typing” keeps a running total in the corner of the document, and selecting a passage first counts only that passage.
In Microsoft Word, the status bar at the bottom of the window shows the running count, and selecting text shows the count for the selection. Review, then Word Count, adds characters, paragraphs and lines, with an option to include text boxes, footnotes and endnotes.
Use this word counter when the text lives somewhere else: a CMS field, an email, a competitor’s page, or HTML that needs the markup stripped before counting. It’s also the quicker route when you want reading time, speaking time or a character limit check, which neither editor shows.
Frequently asked questions
Is this word counter free?
Yes. There’s no sign-up and no limit on how often you use it, and the text you paste stays in your browser.
How many words is a 5-minute speech?
About 650 words at a typical speaking pace of 130 words per minute. A brisk speaker covers 750 in the same time and a slow, deliberate one nearer 500. Put your own pace into the speaking box for a closer estimate.
How many pages is 1,000 words?
Roughly two pages single-spaced or four pages double-spaced, in a 12-point font with standard margins. Font, spacing and headings all move the figure, so treat it as a rough guide.
How many characters should a meta description be?
Aim for about 140 to 155 characters. Google trims longer descriptions on desktop and often rewrites them anyway, so put the important part first. Paste a description into the counter and the limits panel shows where it lands.
Does word count affect SEO rankings?
Indirectly. Longer pages tend to cover more of the search intent and rank better, but the cause is the depth of the content, not the number. Adding 1,000 words of filler to a 500-word page makes it longer and worse. Add words only when there is more useful content to add.
What’s a good word count for a blog post?
It depends on the topic and the search intent. A glossary definition needs 200 to 400 words, a standard article 800 to 1,500 and a pillar guide 2,000 or more. Write what the topic warrants; pages rank because they cover the subject well, not because they hit a target.
Does the tool count “well-known” as one word or two?
One word. Hyphenated compounds count as one, because the counter splits on whitespace. If you want hyphens treated as separators, add spaces.
Can I exclude HTML tags from the count?
Yes. The Strip HTML option parses the markup and counts only the visible text.
Why does my count differ from Microsoft Word’s?
Counters use slightly different rules for punctuation, numbers and symbols. The differences are small (a few percent) and don’t matter for SEO purposes.
Common problems
The word count differs from what my CMS reports
CMSs have their own counting rules. Some include alt text or meta fields, and some count differently by language. This tool counts the visible body text, so paste the same content the CMS is counting if you need the two to match.
The reading time looks too fast
The default 220 wpm is silent reading of familiar material. For technical content, drop it to 180 or 150.
The sentence count seems wrong
Abbreviations such as “Dr.”, “Mr.” and “etc.” look like sentence endings to the splitter. The count is approximate by design, so use it for comparison rather than as an exact figure.
The paragraph count is 1 even though there are several paragraphs
Plain text needs a blank line between paragraphs to split correctly, and HTML needs <p> tags. A block of prose with single line breaks reads as one paragraph.
The article is 1,500 words but still feels thin
Word count and depth are different things. A 1,500-word article that meanders and hedges is thinner than a 700-word article that says something specific. Use the count as one signal among several.
Related tools in this suite
The Keyword Density Checker is the natural companion: the word count tells you length, the density checker tells you what the content is about. The AEO Content Scorer goes further into content shape, scoring how easily AI search engines can lift answers from it. When text has to fit a search result, the SERP Preview shows where Google will cut a title or description short. All of them sit in the wider SEO Suite.
What this looks like at scale
For one page, the counter is enough. For a content site, word count is better tracked across the whole set: how many pages are short, standard and long-form, and which ones are unexpectedly thin for their template. The WP Beacon Plugin reports word count distribution across an entire WordPress site and flags pages that are surprisingly short or long.
Take it further
If a content set you have inherited has many thin pages, the fix is usually a mix of consolidation (merging thin pages into stronger ones with redirects) and expansion of the pages worth keeping. Talk through what’s there and we’ll suggest where to start.