What each number actually counts
Every figure is recomputed on each keystroke from the text in the box — there is no request, no upload and no server involved, which is why the counts keep working offline once the page has loaded. The definitions behind them are worth knowing, because they explain the differences you will see against Word or Google Docs.
| Stat | Rule used | Where it will surprise you |
|---|
| Words | Any run of non-whitespace characters | state-of-the-art is one word; a stray em dash surrounded by spaces is counted as a word; 1 000 is two. |
| Characters | UTF-16 code units, the raw string length | An emoji outside the basic plane counts as 2, and a flag emoji as 4. An accented letter typed as a base letter plus a combining accent counts as 2 where the precomposed form counts as 1. |
| Characters (no spaces) | Same, with all whitespace removed | Line breaks and tabs are stripped too, not just spaces. |
| Sentences | A run of text closed by . ! ? or … | Abbreviations inflate the count — "Dr. Smith arrived." reads as two. A trailing fragment with no closing punctuation is not counted at all. |
| Paragraphs | Blocks separated by a blank line | A list where every item sits on its own single line is one paragraph, not ten. |
| Reading time | Words ÷ 225 per minute | A reasonable average for adult silent reading of ordinary English prose; dense technical writing runs far slower. |
| Speaking time | Words ÷ 130 per minute | Close to an unhurried presentation pace. Read a script aloud once before trusting it for a timed slot. |
Limits worth knowing before you trust a number
The word count assumes spaces separate words. For Chinese, Japanese, Thai and other scripts written without word spacing, an entire paragraph registers as a handful of words. Use the character counts there instead — they are the meaningful measure for those languages anyway.
Platform limits are not all character limits. The meters here compare your raw character count against each platform's stated maximum, which is exact for SMS and close enough for captions. It is not exact for X: links are replaced with a fixed-width shortened form when the platform counts, so a post containing a long URL measures longer here than it will there. The SEO title and meta description limits are looser still — Google truncates by pixel width, not by character, so a title full of capitals and wide letters gets cut sooner than one of the same length in narrow ones. Treat 60 and 160 as targets to stay under, not as thresholds to hit.
Keyword density is a diagnostic, not a target. The panel appears once you pass 20 words and lists phrases occurring at least twice. Single words are filtered through a stoplist of common function words and must be longer than two letters; two-word phrases are kept if either half is not a stopword; three-word phrases are not filtered at all, which is why entries like "one of the" appear at the top of that list. Ignore them. The bar is scaled so that anything at or above 12.5% fills it completely.
Using it well
For an assignment with a stated limit, find out first which count the marker uses. Institutions differ on whether footnotes, block quotes, headings and reference lists are included, and a 10% margin either way is common — so the safe move is to land comfortably inside the range rather than to optimise towards the exact number.
For a talk, the speaking-time estimate is most useful as a first cut. Write the draft, check the estimate, then read it aloud with a stopwatch, because pauses, slides and audience laughter are not words and do not appear in the count. Most people who finish early wrote to the estimate and never rehearsed.
For editing, the keyword density panel is at its best when you are looking for accidental repetition rather than optimisation — the noun you have used eleven times in four paragraphs, the phrase that has become a tic. The old idea of writing towards a target density is long obsolete, and matching one is a reliable way to produce text that reads badly. If you want a second angle on the same draft, the readability checker scores sentence and syllable structure, and text tools handles case changes, deduplication and sorting. If the draft is still being written rather than measured, the auto-saving notepad keeps it in local storage between sessions; the rest of the set is on the text tools page.
Read aloud uses your browser's built-in speech synthesis, with the text split into chunks of about 200 characters at sentence boundaries where possible. That chunking is deliberate: Chrome silently cuts off very long single utterances, so a whole essay handed over in one piece stops partway through. Voice quality and available languages come from your operating system, not from this page.