Word & Character Counter

Checking a draft

1. Drop your draft into the Your text box, or start typing straight into it.
2. Read the Words figure first. If the form you are filling in counts characters rather than words, the two Characters cards cover both spellings of that question.
3. Find the card for wherever the text is headed under Platform limits. It shows the count against the cap and says how many characters are left, or how many over.
4. Glance at the readability bar under the cards. Between 60 and 70 is the plain English band that most readers skim without effort.
5. Read the most used words last and see whether your main term sits near one or two percent, or whether one word has quietly run away with the page.

About this tool

The word counter recalculates on every keystroke, so the figures move while you write instead of after you press something. Words is the big number. Ten cards follow it: characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, reading time at 200 words a minute, speaking time at 130, average word length, average sentence length and the two readability scores, and each derived figure says what it was worked out from. Below the text box, a card for each cap that cuts text off says how much room is left or how far over you are: an X post at 280 characters, an Instagram caption at 2,200, a meta description at 160, a headline at 70, an SEO title at 60.

A character is what a reader sees as one, so a skin-toned thumbs-up or a family emoji counts once. Chinese, Japanese, Thai and the other scripts written without spaces are counted by character, and text that mixes them gets both figures. Sentences are found by the browser's own sentence rules, so Mr. and p.m. no longer end one, and the Sentences card says where it split. Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch-Kincaid grade come from sentence length and an estimate of syllables per word; the band sits on a bar under the cards, and a score that falls off its own scale, as a one-line headline's does, is withheld rather than printed. The table of most used words ranks your ten commonest, with filler like the and of left out until you tick Include common words.

One meta description, written twice

First attempt: “We compress your PDF files quickly and securely, reducing the size of every page while keeping the quality of your document intact, so it stays easy to email.” The Meta description card reads 158 / 160, 2 to spare, so on length it squeaks through. Reading ease is 36.4, Difficult, at grade 15.1, on 28 words in one sentence, because the whole thing is one long sentence.

Second attempt: “Compress a PDF to under 5 MB without installing anything. Drag the file in, pick a target size, and download the smaller version.” Now it is 129 characters across two sentences, average sentence length 11.5, reading ease 70.1, Easy, grade 6.3. Same offer, 29 characters shorter, and a reader gets it first time.

Good to know

• Syllables are guessed from spelling rather than looked up in a dictionary, so the two readability scores are close rather than exact. Business is counted as three syllables and science as one. On a paragraph the errors mostly cancel out. On a single sentence they do not, which is one reason a very short text gets no score at all.
• The limits count characters as a reader sees them. X weighs its own way: any link counts as 23 characters however long it is, and each emoji or Chinese and Japanese character counts as two, so a post full of URLs or emoji reads differently here than in X's own composer.