Word and character counter

How to use the counter

Paste your text into the field: the figures update as you type. For an article that is already published, enter its URL instead and click “Fetch”. The tool reads the page, isolates its main content and puts it in the field, where you can still edit it before counting. A drop-down list lets you switch between the main content and the whole page, menus and footer included.

The tool detects the language of pasted text; you can correct it in the “Language of the text” list. It changes nothing in the word or character count, but it sets the reading speed used for the estimated time, since people do not read the same number of words per minute in English and in Italian.

What the tool counts, and how

A word, here, is a sequence of characters between two blanks that contains at least one letter or digit. “Don’t”, “well-known” and “2026” therefore each count as one word, while a colon or a dash standing alone between two spaces counts for nothing.

Characters are counted as they are displayed: an accented letter or an emoji counts as one, even when it is encoded over several bytes. The “spaces included” count includes spaces but not line breaks; the “without spaces” count removes every blank.

Sentences are split by the browser, which recognises full stops, exclamation and question marks, ellipses and line breaks. Paragraphs are the non-empty lines. The average number of words per sentence follows from them: a simple way to spot a text with overly long sentences.

How long does it take to read a text?

The time shown is based on the meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert, from the department of experimental psychology at Ghent University, published in 2019 in the Journal of Memory and Language.¹ It brings together 190 studies and 18,573 participants. In English, an adult reads on average 238 words per minute silently for non-fiction and 260 for fiction; most readers fall between 175 and 300 words per minute. Reading aloud, the average drops to 183 words per minute.

The same study gives speeds per language, calculated from the studies available in each. The tool uses these values:

Values from table 5 of the study.¹ For English, this table gives 236 words per minute for silent reading across all text types; the 238 words per minute quoted above refer to non-fiction.

According to Brysbaert, the differences between languages are largely explained by the number of words each one needs to convey the same message, hence the last column of the table. The time shown remains an average: non-fiction is read more slowly than a story, and a reader who skims a page does not read all of its words.

How many words for an SEO text?

Google requires none. In its documentation on creating helpful content, it lists among the signs of search-engine-first content writing to a particular word count because you have heard Google has a preferred one, and adds in parentheses that it does not.²

The right length is the one that fully answers the searcher’s question. The counter is therefore mostly a way to steer the writing: meet the length of a brief, price a quote per word, compare two versions of the same page, or check that a reworked text has not doubled in length along the way. On a text written with the help of AI, this tracking is part of the review before publishing.

Counting the words of a live page

A web page contains much more than its article: menu, footer, boxes, cookie banners. To count only the text that matters, the tool keeps the main element if the page has one, otherwise the article element if there is only one, otherwise the page without its header, menus, footer and sidebars. This split matches the notion of main content that Google uses to assess a page.

The tool reads the HTML returned by the server. A page that only displays its text after running JavaScript, a password-protected page or a site that blocks automated visits will return little or no text: in that case, copy the text from your browser and paste it into the field.

For the tags of the same page, the character count is not enough, because Google cuts the title according to its width on screen. The title and meta description length checker measures that width in pixels.

Frequently asked questions