What this word counter does
This tool counts the words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and lines in any text as you type. It also estimates reading and speaking time, and shows your most frequent words and two-word phrases with their keyword density — with a stopword filter that hides “the” and “and”. Everything happens instantly, right in your browser: no upload, no waiting, no limit on length.
When you need a word count
A reliable word count matters more often than people expect:
- Students and academics working to an essay or assignment limit.
- Writers and journalists hitting a target length for an article or pitch.
- Marketers trimming meta descriptions, ad copy or social posts to fit hard limits.
- Translators and editors billing or scoping work by word count.
- Speakers checking that a script fits a time slot before a talk.
Because the counter updates live, you can paste a draft, watch the numbers, and edit until you land exactly where you need to be.
How the counts are calculated
Words are detected with Unicode-aware rules rather than a naive space split, so accented words like café or Straße are handled correctly. Hyphenated compounds such as state-of-the-art and contractions like don't count as a single word — the same convention used by Microsoft Word and Google Docs.
Characters are counted as graphemes, which means an emoji like 👍 counts as one character even though it is stored as several bytes. You get both a total character count and a count that excludes spaces, which is the figure most platforms use for their limits.
Reading time assumes an average silent reading speed of 200 words per minute, and speaking time assumes 130 words per minute — a comfortable presentation pace. For scale: a meta-analysis of 190 reading studies by Marc Brysbaert (Journal of Memory and Language, 2019) puts the average adult silent reading rate for non-fiction at about 238 words per minute — the 200 used here is deliberately conservative. These are estimates to help you plan, not exact measurements.
How does keyword density work — and what gets filtered?
Keyword density is a word's share of all words in the text, shown as a percentage next to the most frequent words and two-word phrases. Two details make the numbers trustworthy:
- The stopword filter hides function words like the, and or of from the top lists, using curated German and English lists. The language is detected automatically from the text, and the tool states which list it applied — or that it applied none, when the detection is not confident enough. You can switch the filter off to see the raw frequency, including all the thes.
- The denominator never changes. Density is always calculated against the full word count, not against the words left after filtering — so hiding stopwords never inflates the percentages.
Phrases are counted as exact two-word sequences; a phrase only appears once it occurs at least twice. One honest limitation: sequences run across sentence boundaries, so the last word of one sentence can pair with the first word of the next.
Can I count whole files — without uploading them?
Yes. In the “Count a file” area you can drop a TXT, Markdown, PDF or DOCX file and get the same statistics as for typed text: words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, reading and speaking time. The key difference to almost every other counting tool: your file never leaves your device. PDF and DOCX files are opened and read directly in your browser — there is no upload and no server that ever sees your documents.
Two honest limitations: for PDFs the embedded text layer is read; a scanned PDF without a text layer contains only images, so there is nothing to count (yet) — the tool does not include OCR so far. And for DOCX files the body text is counted; headers, footers and comments are left out.
A quick reference for common limits
| Where | Typical limit |
|---|---|
| SEO meta description | ~155 characters |
| X / Twitter post | 280 characters |
| Google ad headline | 30 characters |
| Standard double-spaced page | ~250 words |
Your text stays private
The word counter runs entirely on your device. Your text is never sent to a server, and it is only stored in your own browser so it is still there when you return. That makes it safe to use for drafts, confidential documents or anything you would rather not upload to a cloud service.