Free Word Counter

What This Free Word Counter Does

This free word counter gives you a clear snapshot of your writing as you type or paste: words, unique words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, and lines. It also estimates reading time and speaking time, shows an approximate reading level, and highlights your most-used keywords with keyword density.

Everything updates live—there’s no submit button—so you can edit and immediately see your counts change.

When a Word Counter Is Useful

A word counter is handy any time you need to stay within a requirement, hit a target, or understand how long your writing feels before you publish or send it.

• Assignments and applications: essays, reports, scholarship answers, and job application text often have limits.
• Publishing and marketing: guest posts, briefs, and newsletters commonly target a word range for readability.
• Character limits: titles, form fields, and social captions can be constrained by character count.
• Editing for repetition: keyword density helps you notice repeated words and phrasing.
• Planning audio or video: reading and speaking time can help estimate script length.

How Word Count and Character Count Work

Different tools can count slightly differently, so it helps to know what’s being measured.

• Words: counted by detecting word-like tokens (letters/numbers), including common contractions.
• Unique words: distinct words after normalizing capitalization (so “Tool” and “tool” are treated the same).
• Characters: every character in the text, including spaces and punctuation.
• Chars (No Spaces): characters excluding whitespace.
• Sentences and paragraphs: estimated using punctuation and line breaks, so formatting can affect totals.

Privacy, Autosave, Clear, and Reset

This tool can autosave your text and settings in your browser so you don’t lose your work if you refresh, navigate away, or come back later. That autosave is stored locally (on your device), not as a public post.

• Clear: clears the text box only.
• Reset: restores defaults and clears locally saved autosave/settings for this tool.

What “Clean Text” Does

Clean Text is a lightweight cleanup option for messy copy-pastes. It doesn’t rewrite your content or fix grammar—it just removes hidden junk that can make text behave weirdly.

• Removes invisible “zero-width” characters that can slip in from PDFs, websites, or editors.
• Normalizes line breaks so your formatting behaves more predictably.
• Trims trailing spaces at the end of lines and cleans up extra whitespace at the edges.

Find & Replace (Case-Sensitive)

Find & Replace is case-sensitive, which means it matches capitalization exactly. For example, searching for “me” won’t match “Me”.

That’s useful when you want precision (like changing “Apple” without touching “apple”).

Keyword Density, Reading Time, and Reading Level

Keyword density helps you see repeated words and phrases. Common stop words (like “the”, “and”, “of”) are filtered so the list focuses on meaningful terms.

Reading time and speaking time are estimates based on your WPM settings. Reading level is an approximate signal based on sentence length and word complexity—useful directionally, not as a strict score.

Common Word and Character Limit Situations

Limits vary by platform and publisher, but these are common places where word count or character count matters:

• Titles/headlines: often need to stay readable and may truncate in previews.
• Meta titles and descriptions: have practical display limits that can shift over time.
• Email subject lines: can truncate on mobile, so shorter often displays more consistently.
• Applications and assignments: frequently specify a range—being far above or below can work against you.