# Word Counter

> Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time as you type, with readability scores and keyword density. Free — no signup, nothing stored.

- Canonical URL: https://www.zyff.app/tools/word-counter
- Status: working
- Price: free, no signup, no watermark
- Processing: runs on Zyff's servers; input is held in memory for the request and never stored

Zyff's word counter reports words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, unique words and syllables as you type, alongside a reading time, a speaking time, a page count and six readability scores. It is built for the moment the target is a hard number — 280 characters for a post, about 155 for a meta description, 650 words for a Common App essay — so every common limit is listed with a bar showing how much room is left. A keyword density panel ranks the single words and the two- and three-word phrases the text repeats, and the whole analysis can be copied or downloaded as a plain-text report. Counting runs on Zyff's servers, which is what makes the sentence detection, syllable estimates and readability grades identical on every device; your draft is held in memory for the length of one request and never stored. Free, no signup, no limit on how often you use it.

## How to count words and characters in text

1. **Paste or type your text** — Drop in a draft, an essay, a caption or an email, or drag a .txt or .md file onto the box. The counter reads whatever is in the editor and re-counts a moment after you stop typing.
2. **Read the live counts** — Words, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and reading time all sit in one panel, so you never switch modes to find the one number you came for.
3. **Pick the limit you are writing to** — Choose a target — an X post, a meta description, an essay word count, or your own number — and a bar shows what you have used and what is left, turning amber near the limit and red past it.
4. **Check readability and repeated phrases** — The readability tab grades the text with six standard formulas, and the keywords tab ranks the words and phrases you repeat most, with common words filtered out by default.
5. **Copy the report or trim and repeat** — Copy the full report to the clipboard or download it as a .txt file, then cut the long sentences the structure panel flags and watch the numbers settle where you need them.

## Features

- **Words and both character counts**: Characters with spaces and characters without spaces are counted separately, because form fields, meta tags and message limits do not all measure a string the same way. Characters are counted the way a person counts them, so one emoji is one character rather than four.
- **Sentences and paragraphs that survive real prose**: Sentence detection knows that Dr., e.g., 3.14 and example.com do not end a sentence, which is what stops a page of abbreviations from tripling the sentence count and dragging every readability score down with it.
- **Six readability formulas, not one**: Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau and the Automated Readability Index are all shown. They disagree, and the disagreement tells you whether the text is hard because the words are long or because the sentences are.
- **Keyword density at one, two and three words**: The phrases the text actually repeats, ranked with counts and density. Function words are filtered by default, along with phrases that start or end with one, so the list shows the subject rather than “of the” eleven times.
- **Every limit people write to**: X, Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, meta descriptions, page titles, ad copy, SMS, UCAS statements, Common App essays and abstracts — each with a note saying whether the number is a hard platform maximum or an editorial convention.
- **Reading and speaking time you can adjust**: Both estimates show the words-per-minute they assume and let you change it, because a technical paper and a blog post are not read at the same speed and a script is delivered slower than either.
- **A report you can hand over**: Copy the whole analysis or download it as a .txt file. The report is generated on the server from the same numbers on screen, so the file in a brief cannot drift from the panel it was read off.
- **Free, no signup, nothing stored**: No account, no paywall, nothing to install, and no cap on how much you count. Text is processed in memory on Zyff's servers and never written anywhere, and the page works the same on a phone.

## Specifications

| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Maximum text | 200,000 characters (roughly 35,000 words) |
| Counted | Words, characters, characters without spaces, letters, digits, sentences, paragraphs, lines, unique words, syllables |
| Readability | Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, Automated Readability Index — from 25 words |
| Keyword density | Top 10 phrases at 1, 2 and 3 words, with an optional common-word filter and case sensitivity |
| Reading speed | 100-1,000 words per minute, default 225 |
| Speaking speed | 80-300 words per minute, default 140 |
| Page estimate | 500 words per single-spaced page, 250 double-spaced (12pt, 1in margins) |
| File upload | .txt, .md, .markdown, .csv, .tsv, .log, .rtf up to 2 MB |
| Export | Plain-text report, copied to the clipboard or downloaded as .txt |
| Languages | Any script. CJK characters are counted as one word each; readability formulas are English-only |
| Account | Not needed. Free and unmetered |

## Frequently asked questions

**How many words are on a page?**

Roughly 500 words per single-spaced page and 250 double-spaced, based on 12pt Times New Roman with one-inch margins. Font, size, spacing and margins move that number a lot, so a 1,000-word piece is about two single-spaced pages or four double-spaced. Check the exact format your instructor or client asked for.

**What is the difference between characters with and without spaces?**

Characters with spaces counts every character including spaces, tabs and line breaks. Characters without spaces counts only the visible ones. Which figure matters depends on where the text is going: message and social limits count spaces, while some translation and typesetting rates are quoted per character excluding them.

**How is reading time calculated?**

Reading time is the word count divided by an assumed reading speed. Silent reading of English prose is commonly estimated at 200 to 250 words per minute, so a 1,000-word article lands at four to five minutes. Speaking is slower, around 130 to 150 words per minute, which is why a script takes about twice as long to deliver as to read.

**How many characters should a meta description be?**

About 150 to 160 characters is the usual working range, though Google truncates snippets by pixel width rather than a fixed character count. Put the important words in the first 120 characters so the description still reads correctly if it gets cut. Google also rewrites descriptions often, so treat yours as a strong suggestion.

**How many words is a 5 minute speech?**

Roughly 650 to 750 words at a normal speaking pace of 130 to 150 words per minute. Slow down for a technical or emotional talk and 600 words can fill five minutes, while a fast conversational delivery can run past 800. Read the script aloud with a timer before you trust any word count.

**Does a word counter count hyphenated words as one word?**

Usually yes, and Zyff does. Text is split on whitespace first, so well-known, don't, 3.14, 1,000 and a URL each count as one word — the same answer a word processor gives. Written as well - known, with spaces around the dash, it is two words, because a lone dash is punctuation rather than a word.

**How accurate is the readability score?**

The formulas are exact; their inputs are estimates. Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau and the Automated Readability Index are arithmetic on sentence length, word length and syllable counts, and syllables are worked out with a phonetic heuristic that agrees with a dictionary on roughly nine English words in ten. Zyff shows all six scores and only grades text of 25 words or more, because below that the numbers swing several grade levels per word you add.

**What is a good keyword density?**

There is no target worth chasing. Keyword density stopped being a ranking factor long before modern search ranking, and writing to a percentage produces text that reads like it was written to a percentage. The panel is useful for the opposite job: spotting the phrase you have leaned on eleven times without noticing, and confirming that the subject of the piece is the thing being repeated.

**Does the word counter store my text?**

No. Counting happens on Zyff's servers, so the text is sent over an encrypted connection, held in memory for the length of that one request, and discarded when the response is sent. Nothing is written to disk, nothing is logged, and the response carries a no-store header so it is not cached on the way back. There is no account, so there is no history of drafts anywhere to delete.

**Can I count the words in a Word document or PDF?**

Not directly — .docx and .pdf are binary containers rather than text, and Zyff refuses them instead of counting the compression noise inside. Copy the text and paste it in, or export the file as plain text. Files ending .txt, .md, .csv, .tsv, .log and .rtf up to 2 MB can be dropped straight onto the box.

**How are emoji and Chinese characters counted?**

An emoji counts as one character, including the ones built from several code points like a flag or a skin-toned thumbs-up, because that is what someone writing to a 280-character limit counted. Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters count as one word each, which is the convention every desktop word processor follows for scripts that do not put spaces between words.

## Related tools

- [Case Converter](https://www.zyff.app/tools/case-converter): Title, Sentence, UPPER, lower, camelCase, snake_case.
- [Title Case Converter](https://www.zyff.app/tools/title-case-converter): Title case by AP, APA, Chicago, MLA, NYT or Wikipedia rules.
- [Diff Checker](https://www.zyff.app/tools/diff-checker): Compare two texts, JSON, HTML or code and see every change.
- [Markdown Viewer](https://www.zyff.app/tools/markdown-viewer): Open a .md file or paste Markdown and read it rendered.
- [URL Slug Generator](https://www.zyff.app/tools/slug-generator): Turn a headline into a clean, lowercase URL slug.