Word counter
Paste your text to count its words and see the words you repeat most. The example sentence pair has 17 words and 10 different words; "plain" and "text" each appear 3 times, 17.6% of all words (3 ÷ 17).
How to use this tool · what to enter and what the result means
Words
17
Different words
10
Characters
89
Sentences
2
Average word length
–
Reading time
–
Most used words
| # | Word | Times | Share |
|---|
How it works
–
- Words are runs of characters between spaces or line breaks, so "e-mail" and "don't" count as one word and a number like "2026" counts as a word. This is the same rule the character counter uses.
- Word frequency: each word is lowercased, so "Text" and "text" are the same word; punctuation around a word is ignored; curly and straight apostrophes are treated alike. The share is how many times the word appears ÷ all the words in the table's count.
- Common words: with the box ticked, 83 short function words (articles, pronouns, linking words and forms of "be", "have" and "do" such as the, and, is, it) are left out of the table so the words that carry your topic stand out. They still count in the word total.
- Average word length is the letters and digits in the counted words ÷ their number. Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, the average adult silent-reading rate for English non-fiction (source on data sources).
Using a word count
- Repeated words: if one word takes a large share of a short text, try a synonym or rephrase; the table shows the repeats at a glance.
- Assignments and forms: teachers and websites can count words differently (for example hyphenated words, numbers or the title); when a limit matters, check which rule they use.
- Characters instead of words: for social posts and text messages the limit is in characters; the character counter checks those limits.