Word counter. Every count you need, as you type.

Every word counter has to decide what a word is, and they don't all agree. This one uses the rules below, which match what most students expect. Words are separated by spaces and line breaks. A hyphenated word or a contraction is one word, so well-known, state-of-the-art and don't each count once. Numbers count too: 1,500, 3.14 and 50% are one word each, and a web address is one word however long it is.

Dashes are the main exception. An em dash between two words, as in this—that, splits them, so that's two words, and the same goes for a double hyphen or an ellipsis between words. Stand-alone symbols such as an ampersand or a bullet aren't words, and neither are emoji. Text that is only spaces counts as zero. Chinese, Japanese and Thai don't put spaces between words, so for those the counter uses your browser's built-in word segmenter. Counts in those languages are reasonable estimates, and other tools may split some phrases differently.

Characters are counted the way you see them, so an accented letter or an emoji with a skin tone counts once, not as the two or three hidden code points behind it. Characters includes spaces but not line breaks, as Word and Google Docs do, and without spaces leaves out all whitespace. For example, café followed by a space and a thumbs-up emoji is 6 characters, or 5 without spaces. A sentence ends at a period, question mark or exclamation point followed by a space, or at a line break, but not after abbreviations such as Dr. or e.g. A paragraph is any line with words on it.

If your count differs from your word processor's by a few words, an edge case is usually the reason: tools treat em dashes, web addresses and symbols differently, and Word's count includes or leaves out footnotes and text boxes depending on a checkbox in its Word Count dialog. When a limit is tight, check the count in the tool your instructor will use, and leave yourself a little margin.

Most assignments give a length in words or in pages. Pages are the looser measure. A common rule of thumb is about 500 words for a single-spaced page and 250 for a double-spaced one, in 12 pt type with 1-inch margins, and that's how the page estimate above is worked out. Fonts, headings and short paragraphs move it a lot, so treat pages as an estimate and go by the word count whenever the instructions give one.

What a word limit allows varies more than students expect. Some instructors accept 10% either side, some treat the number as a hard ceiling, and some leave the title, headings, reference list, tables or footnotes out of the count while others include everything. Application essays tend to be strict because the form enforces them: the Common App personal essay, for instance, won't take more than 650 words. There's no universal rule, so check your instructor's policy or the assignment brief, and ask if it says nothing. If your references don't count, the citation generator keeps them from eating into your writing time.

Reading and speaking time help when you're writing something to be heard or skimmed. Reading time here uses 238 words a minute, the average silent reading rate for English non-fiction in Brysbaert's 2019 review of 190 studies. Speaking time uses 150 words a minute, the National Center for Voice and Speech's figure for average American English speech. Both are averages, and your own pace may be quite different, so time yourself once before a talk.

As a worked example, a 1,500-word essay comes out at 6 min 18 sec to read silently and 10 min to say aloud, and fills about 3 single-spaced or 6 double-spaced pages. Turned around, a 10-minute talk at an average pace is roughly 1,500 words of script, which is less than most people expect when they start writing one.

When you're over a limit, cut padding before you cut ideas. Most drafts carry stock phrases, doubled words and sentences built around a noun where a verb would do. Each fix below keeps the meaning and saves several words, and the counts in parentheses are what this counter reports.

Swap long phrases for one word. "In order to" is "to", "due to the fact that" is "because" and "at this point in time" is "now". Before (14 words): Due to the fact that the sample was small, the results cannot be generalized. After (10): Because the sample was small, the results cannot be generalized.

Turn nouns back into verbs. Phrases like "made a decision" and "conduct an investigation" hide the action inside a noun. Before (12): The committee made a decision to conduct an investigation into the matter. After (7): The committee decided to investigate the matter.

Drop empty openers. "There are... who" and "it is important to" delay the point. Before (11): There are many students who find that the reading is difficult. After (6): Many students find the reading difficult. Before (18): In order to understand the causes of the war, it is important to look at the economy first. After (10): To understand the war's causes, look first at the economy.

Use the active voice when the actor matters. Before (14): The experiment was carried out by the researchers over a period of six weeks. After (8): The researchers ran the experiment for six weeks.

Cut doubled words and intensifiers. "Each and every", "absolutely essential" and "past history" say one thing twice. Before (12): It is absolutely essential that each and every participant gives their consent. After (4): Every participant must consent.

Make one pass for each kind of fix rather than rereading everything at once, and use the longest-sentence button in the counter to find the sentence most likely to be carrying extra weight. If you're under a limit instead, don't pad. Add the evidence, example or counterargument a careful reader would expect.

Flesch Reading Ease comes from Rudolf Flesch's 1948 paper, and it uses only two things: the average sentence length in words and the average number of syllables per word. The formula is 206.835 − 1.015 × (words ÷ sentences) − 84.6 × (syllables ÷ words). Higher scores are easier. Flesch's own table calls 60 to 69 standard, 30 to 49 difficult and anything below 30 very difficult.

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level re-weights the same two inputs to give a US school grade: 0.39 × (words ÷ sentences) + 11.8 × (syllables ÷ words) − 15.59. Kincaid and colleagues fitted it in 1975 using reading tests taken by Navy enlisted personnel. A score of 8 means a reader with about eight years of schooling should follow the text.

The sample paragraph in the counter has 89 words in 5 sentences, or 17.8 words a sentence, and the counter estimates 124 syllables, about 1.393 a word. That gives a Reading Ease of 206.835 − 1.015 × 17.8 − 84.6 × 1.393 = 70.9, fairly easy, and a grade level of 0.39 × 17.8 + 11.8 × 1.393 − 15.59 = 7.8.

Read the scores as a rough signal, not a grade on your writing. They can't tell whether a word is familiar, whether the argument holds together, or whether a long sentence is long because it's careful. Syllables are estimated by rule here, so expect small differences from Word and other tools, and a few sentences make the scores jumpy. Academic writing often lands in the difficult band, which is fine for a specialist reader. If a score is very low and your reader isn't a specialist, the fix is the same as for cutting words: shorter sentences and plainer verbs.