Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, syllables; estimate reading and speaking time; check Flesch readability.
About this tool
Word Counter shows live counts for words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, and syllables. It also estimates reading time, speaking time, and a Flesch reading-ease score, and includes a quick target-length meter for common lengths.
What the Flesch score means
Flesch reading ease rates text on a 0–100 scale: higher = easier. The formula is 206.835 − 1.015 × words/sentences − 84.6 × syllables/words.
- 90–100: Very easy — children’s books
- 70–80: Easy — conversational
- 50–60: Standard — what a blog should aim for
- 30–40: Difficult — academic writing
- 10–20: Very difficult — legal / scholarly
Reading and speaking time
Reading time uses 220 words per minute, which is the average adult reading rate for general fiction. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, the comfortable pace for lectures or podcasts. Both round up to at least 1 minute so empty text reads as “0 min”.
Target length
Pick a preset (Twitter post, meta description, blog, essay) and the bar fills up as you type. The character count uses no-spaces counts so meta-description limits match what real SEO tooling measures.
How syllables are counted
This tool uses a vowel-grouping heuristic. Accuracy for English is ~85%; it’s fine for a quick at-a-glance score, but for a final analysis a proper English syllable library like syllable npm package or CMUdict would be more accurate. For non-English text the score is still meaningful as a relative metric.
Privacy
All counts run in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.