Word Counter: Words, Characters, Reading Time and Keyword Density
Type or paste your text and every count updates as you go. Nothing is uploaded: the counting happens in your browser and the text stays on this device.
Paste an article, an essay or a caption. Words, characters, sentences, reading time and the most repeated phrases update as you type. Your text is saved in this browser so it is still here when you come back.
Keyword density
The words and phrases you repeat most. Density is the number of times a phrase appears divided by the total word count. Common words like "the" and "and" are left out.
| Word or phrase | Times | Density |
|---|
How this word counter counts words
A word is any run of letters or digits, in any script, so accented words like café and words in Indonesian, Vietnamese or Cyrillic all count. A few rules decide the edge cases:
| Text | Counted as | Why |
|---|---|---|
| well-known, anak-anak | 1 word | Hyphenated words and Indonesian reduplication are one word, as in Microsoft Word |
| don't, it's | 1 word | An apostrophe inside a word does not split it |
| 3.5, 1,200, 10:30 | 1 word | Numbers keep their decimal and thousands separators |
| SEO - tips | 2 words | A dash with spaces around it is punctuation, not a word |
| example.com/blog | 3 words | Web addresses are split at dots and slashes |
Different editors disagree on the edge cases, so expect a difference of a few words against Google Docs or Word on long texts with many links or symbols. For an essay with a limit, the difference rarely matters; for a contract that pays per word, agree on the counting tool first.
Characters, sentences and paragraphs
Characters are counted as you see them on screen, so an emoji or an accented letter built from two code points counts once. "Without spaces" removes spaces, tabs and line breaks. Sentences end at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by a space, and common abbreviations like Mr., Dr., e.g. and etc. do not end a sentence. Every line break starts a new paragraph, which matches how text pasted from Google Docs, WordPress or email arrives.
Reading time and speaking time
Reading time uses 238 words per minute for English. That figure comes from Marc Brysbaert's 2019 review and meta-analysis of reading-rate studies, "How many words do we read per minute?", in the Journal of Memory and Language. It found an average silent reading rate of 238 words per minute for English non-fiction and 260 for fiction. Brysbaert also notes that the rate in words per minute depends on how long a language's words are, so for Indonesian, which has longer words, I use about 200 words per minute as an estimate.
Speaking time uses 150 words per minute for English, the average conversational rate for American English speakers given by the National Center for Voice and Speech. For Indonesian I use 130, which is my own estimate for a calm presentation pace, not a published figure. Time a test read of your own speech if the timing matters.
Keyword density, and why there is no ideal number
Density is the number of times a word or phrase appears divided by the total word count, times 100. A phrase used 6 times in a 1,200-word article has a density of 0.5%. Common function words are left out of the table so the list shows topics, not grammar. Two- and three-word phrases appear once they are used at least twice.
Google does not reward a target density. Its spam policies name keyword stuffing, repeating the same words unnaturally, as something that can hurt a page. I use the table the other way round: to spot a phrase I have repeated so often that it reads badly, and to check that the words a searcher would use actually appear in the text.
Common length limits
| Where | Limit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Google title | About 60 characters | Google cuts at roughly 600 pixels on desktop, so wide letters run out sooner |
| Meta description | About 155 characters | No hard limit; Google shows about 920 pixels on desktop and rewrites often |
| X post | 280 characters | For standard accounts; X counts every link as 23 characters and some emoji and CJK characters as 2 |
| Instagram caption | 2,200 characters | Only the first lines show before "more", so lead with the point |
How long should an article be?
As long as it takes to answer the search completely. Google's John Mueller has said several times that word count is not a ranking factor. A useful check is to search your main keyword, open the top results and count them here: if they all run 1,500 words and cover subtopics you skipped, the gap is the subtopics, not the length.
Is my text private?
Yes. This page has no server side. The counting runs in your browser, and the text is saved only in this browser's local storage so it survives a reload. Press Clear to delete it from the page and from storage.