Word Counter

How many words are in 6–8 or 8–12 sentences?

Sentence count alone does not determine word count. Multiply the number of sentences by an assumed average sentence length to estimate it: words = sentences × words per sentence. At 15 words each, 6–8 sentences contain 90–120 words and 8–12 contain 120–180. At 20 words each, those ranges become 120–160 and 160–240. These assumptions describe the examples below, not a rule for English writing.

Word totals when every sentence has the stated length

Sentences	10 words each	15 words each	20 words each
6	60	90	120
8	80	120	160
12	120	180	240

For a reproducible example, repeat “We read the draft and count the words before lunch.” six times, with spaces between sentences. Each copy has 10 words, so the tool reports 60 words and 6 sentences. Eight copies give 80 words and 8 sentences; twelve give 120 words and 12 sentences. For a real assignment, paste the actual paragraph instead of treating a sentence requirement as a fixed word target.

How do you count words without citations or parentheses?

Select Exclude citations to filter recognized references before analysis. Author-date recognition checks a parenthetical passage for an author-like opening and a supported date, including a four-digit year from 1500 through 2099 or “n.d.”. Numbered references such as [1], [1, 3] and [2-5] are also recognized. This does not identify a separate reference list or parse every academic citation style.

Select Exclude text in ( ) when ordinary parenthetical comments should also be omitted. Balanced passages with at most two levels of nesting are supported. Unmatched parentheses and passages nested more deeply are left in place. Review the skipped-passage note and compare the count with your assignment's requirements rather than assuming every reference has been detected.

Word counts for two short exclusion examples

Text entered	No exclusions	Option	Filtered words
Cats sleep (Smith, 2020).	4	Exclude citations	2
Cats (small pets) sleep.	4	Exclude text in ( )	2

The editor retains your original draft. Counts, readability and keyword results use the filtered version, while Highlight still follows the original editor text. Copy Stats copies the current statistics; the editor's text-copy control copies the original text. Exclusions replace removed passages with spaces and clean up repeated spaces and spaces before punctuation, so filtered character counts can change beyond the letters inside a removed passage.

How does the counter define words, sentences and characters?

Words are nonempty chunks separated by whitespace, including spaces, tabs and line breaks. Contractions and hyphenated compounds without intervening whitespace count as one word. A standalone punctuation mark surrounded by spaces also counts as a word in the main total. Unique Words uses a separate normalization step that lowercases tokens and strips leading and trailing characters outside JavaScript's word-character set; for example, “Run run!” gives two words and one unique word. This is not linguistic word segmentation for every language.

Sentence detection matches text ending in a period, exclamation mark or question mark. Nonempty text with no matching sentence ending falls back to one sentence. Once a completed sentence exists, an unfinished trailing fragment does not add another sentence. Abbreviations and decimal points can therefore affect the result. Paragraphs are nonempty blocks separated by blank lines; Lines counts newline-separated lines, including empty ones.

Characters uses grapheme segmentation when available, with a Unicode code-point fallback. No Spaces removes all whitespace, including newlines, before counting. For more character-focused work, open Character Counter. Use the Text Case Converter when you need to change capitalization before measuring a revised draft.

How can you track a 400-word goal and estimate reading time?

Enter 400 in Goal:. At 300 counted words, progress is 75%; at 400, it reaches 100%. The bar stops at 100% even if your draft exceeds the target, while Words continues showing the actual count. The approximate page count uses 250 words per page: 400 words becomes about 1.6 pages. It is a word-based estimate rather than a formatted-document preview.

Pace: offers Slow at 150, Normal at 200, Fast at 238 and Speed at 300 reading words per minute. Fast is the initial setting. Speaking pace is the reading rate multiplied by 0.63 and rounded to a whole number, giving 150 speaking words per minute at the initial setting. Time estimates divide the counted words by the selected rate; they do not measure your personal reading or delivery speed.

What do readability, keywords and Highlight tell you?

The Readability panel appears at 10 counted words and shows Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog, ARI and Coleman-Liau. Syllables come from an English vowel-group heuristic, so treat these as estimates, especially for names and non-English text. The implementation clamps Flesch Reading Ease to 0–100. Its formula uses average sentence length and average syllables per word; it does not judge whether an argument is correct or complete.

Under Keywords, choose 1-Word, 2-Word or 3-Word. Results include only items occurring at least twice and show at most 10 per tab. Common English stop words are omitted from single-word results, and phrases made entirely of stop words are omitted too. Density divides an item's occurrence count by the cleaned token total, even for multiword phrases.

Highlight marks completed sentences by whitespace-based length: violet for 1 word, blue for 2–6, no background for 7–15, amber for 16–25, orange for 26–39 and red for 40 or more. An unfinished trailing fragment has no highlight. Use this as a visual editing aid alongside the numeric counts, not as an automatic instruction to shorten every long sentence.

Where is your draft processed and saved?

The analysis functions run locally in the browser. When browser storage is available, auto-save writes your draft to localStorage after a 1.2-second pause and restores it when the tool mounts again. The Saved indicator confirms a successful write. Storage restrictions or quota failures can prevent saving. Clear empties the editor and removes the saved draft; on a shared browser, use it when you have finished with text you do not want retained.