Word Counter
Check an essay, application, speech, or form against its real word and character limits. Counts stay on this device.
Private by design: the draft is analysed in this tab and is not included in the copied or downloaded summary. Avoid pasting sensitive text on a shared device.
Draft pages use the words-per-page assumption below; actual page count depends on layout, font, spacing, and references.
Adjust planning assumptions
These are planning assumptions, not universal standards. Change them to match your audience and document format.
Flesch scores are rough English-prose estimates. They are hidden for short or mostly non-English text and should not be treated as a quality, intelligence, or academic-grade verdict.
- Type some text to see keyword density
Check a real submission limit
Paste an essay, personal statement, scholarship response, speech, or form answer, then enter the limit stated by the institution or form. The checker reports exact words or characters remaining and distinguishes minimums from maximums. Because institutions can count headings, citations, numbers, and hyphenated terms differently, the submitting institution remains the final authority.
How the counts and estimates work
Every metric updates live in your browser as you type. Here is exactly how each one is calculated:
- Words — Unicode letter and number sequences are counted, with apostrophised and hyphenated terms such as “student’s” and “well-known” kept as one word.
- Characters — one count includes Unicode code points; the second removes all whitespace, including spaces, tabs, and line breaks. Some submission systems count combined accents or emoji differently.
- Reading and speaking time — words are divided by editable words-per-minute assumptions. The defaults are 200 for reading and 130 for speaking, but pace varies.
- Flesch Reading Ease — the formula
206.835 − 1.015 × (words/sentences) − 84.6 × (syllables/words), scored 0–100 where higher is easier. - Flesch-Kincaid Grade —
0.39 × (words/sentences) + 11.8 × (syllables/words) − 15.59, an English-prose reading-complexity estimate expressed as a US grade level. - Repeated phrases — the frequency of each 1-, 2-, and 3-word phrase as a percentage of all words. This describes repetition; it does not predict search rankings.
Important: readability uses an English syllable heuristic and may differ from specialist software. The draft stays in this tab, is not written to local storage, and is excluded from summary exports.