Word counter & readability
Live word, character, sentence and paragraph counts, plus reading time, speaking time and page estimates at 275 words a page. Then the part other counters skip: a Flesch Reading Ease score, your average sentence length, and the words you have leaned on too hard.
- Free
- No sign-up
- Works offline
- Nothing uploaded
Nothing leaves your browser — there is no upload and no server call.
Set a target and you will get a progress bar plus a live “words to go” count.
Counts
- Words
- 0
- Pages
- 0
- Characters
- 0
- Characters
- 0
- Sentences
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- Reading time
- 0 sec
- Speaking time
- 0 sec
at 275 words/page
with spaces
without spaces
238 wpm
130 wpm
Readability
Flesch Reading Ease runs from 0 (impenetrable) to 100 (very simple).
- Words / sentence
- —
- Syllables / word
- —
aim for 15–25
estimated
Most-used words
Common connectives are filtered out, so what is left is your actual vocabulary.
Your top ten will appear once you start typing.
Three steps, no upload
- 1
Paste your draft in
Straight out of Word, Google Docs or Notion. The text stays in your browser — there is no upload, no file parsing and no server call, so it works on the train with no signal.
- 2
Set your target word count
You get a progress bar and a live “N words to go” or “N words over”. Most UK departments allow 10% either way, but check your handbook: some count references, some do not.
- 3
Read the readability panel
Average sentence length and the Flesch score tell you whether a marker will glide through your argument or have to re-read it. Then check the top-10 words for anything you have leaned on.
What a word count cannot tell you, and what readability can
Hitting 2,000 words is the easy part. Whether those 2,000 words are readable at a marker's pace is what separates a 58 from a 68.
A marker will spend somewhere between fifteen and forty minutes on your essay, and they will read it after a stack of others. Readability is not about dumbing down — it is about making sure the argument you have actually built is the argument that lands.
Sentence length is the biggest lever. Flesch Reading Ease is driven mostly by words per sentence. Academic writing sits comfortably at 15–25 words on average. Once you pass 30, you are usually joining two claims with a comma and a “which”, and the reader has to reconstruct which one you meant.
Vary the rhythm. An average of 20 can hide ten sentences of 40 and ten of nothing. A short sentence after a long one is the cheapest emphasis in writing. Use it on your strongest claim.
Watch the repetition. The top-10 list strips out connectives and shows what you are really writing about. If your key concept is not in the top three, the essay may be drifting from the question. If a single hedging word is at the top, you may be arguing less firmly than you think.
Use speaking time for presentations. At a comfortable 130 words a minute, a ten-minute talk is about 1,300 words — and almost everyone writes 2,000 and then rushes. Check the estimate before you write, not after.
Reading Flesch scores
| Score | What it means |
|---|---|
| 70–100 | Fairly easy to very easy. Conversational. Right for a reflective journal or a blog, usually too light for a degree-level argument. |
| 60–69 | Plain English. The sweet spot for most undergraduate coursework: precise but readable, and the marker never has to reverse. |
| 50–59 | Fairly difficult. Typical of well-written academic prose. Longer sentences, more technical vocabulary — perfectly normal here. |
| 30–49 | Difficult. University-level and dense. Common in literature reviews and methodology chapters. Fine in stretches, tiring across 8,000 words. |
| 0–29 | Very difficult. Postgraduate-plus. Worth scanning for sentences carrying two ideas that would be clearer as two sentences. |
Syllable counts use a heuristic rather than a dictionary, so the Flesch score is an estimate — reliably within a couple of points on ordinary prose, less so on text packed with acronyms, chemical names or equations. Use it to spot trends across drafts, not as a figure to quote.
Word counter FAQ
How is the word count calculated?
By counting runs of non-whitespace characters, which is the same method Microsoft Word and Google Docs use. A hyphenated compound like “well-argued” counts as one word, and a number counts as one word. Expect the total to match Word exactly on ordinary prose and to differ by a handful on text with a lot of symbols or equations.
What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score for an essay?
Somewhere between 40 and 60 for most degree-level work. Below 30 usually means your sentences have grown past the point where a marker can hold them in their head; above 70 often means the analysis has thinned out into description. The score is a prompt to re-read, not a target to chase.
Why does the tool flag words that make up more than 3% of my text?
Because that is roughly where repetition stops being emphasis and starts being a tic. Once a term other than your core subject keyword passes 3% of the total, a marker will notice it before they notice your argument. Common culprits are “however”, “significant”, “important” and whichever theorist you found first.
Is my writing sent anywhere?
No. Everything is calculated in JavaScript inside your browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is logged, and nothing is stored between visits — close the tab and the text is gone. That also means you should copy anything you want to keep before you leave.
Ready for a specialist to read it properly?
A readability score tells you a sentence is heavy. It will not tell you the paragraph is in the wrong place. Our editors mark up your actual draft — structure, argument, evidence and expression — and explain every change so the next one is better.
More free tools
Reference generator
Six styles, correctly formatted, with matching in-text citations.
Grade calculator
Weighted average, UK classification and the mark you still need.
Deadline planner
A dated working-back schedule you can export to your calendar.