Word Counter: Count Words, Characters & Sentences
Free online word counter: count words, characters, sentences, syllables and unique words as you type. Check social media limits, spot passive voice, export as PDF.
Content Editor
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Words
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Characters
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Reading Time
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Speaking Time
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Syllables
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Unique Words
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Passive Sentences
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Reading Ease
Social Media Limits
Top Words
Type a few sentences to see your most frequent words.
Structure
Readability
Readability score appears once you start writing.
About this tool
The Wrklyst Word Counter tallies words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, syllables, and unique words live as you type, alongside estimated reading and speaking times, a ranked list of your ten most-used words, passive-voice detection, a Flesch readability score, and a character-limit checker for Twitter/X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and SEO meta tags. Students squeezing essays under a limit, SEO writers hitting length targets, and speechwriters timing their remarks all lean on it daily — and when you're done, the full statistics report exports to PDF in one click.
How to Use the Word Counter
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Type directly into the editor or paste your draft from Word, Google Docs, or an email — the statistics recalculate on every keystroke, with no button to press.
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Watch the headline metrics — words, characters, reading time, speaking time, syllables, unique words, passive sentences, and readability — plus the social-media limit bars and the sidebar's structure and top-words breakdowns update as you revise.
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When the numbers land where you need them, use the copy icon to grab your polished text, hit Export PDF to download the full statistics report, or the reset icon to clear the editor and start fresh.
Why Count Words with Wrklyst
- Counted on Your Screen, Nowhere Else
- Every statistic is computed inside your browser tab. The draft you paste is never transmitted, logged, or recoverable by anyone — close the tab and it's gone.
- Instant at Any Length
- With no server round trip, a 50,000-word manuscript counts as quickly as a tweet — the feedback keeps pace with your typing.
- Open and Go
- No account, cookie wall, or premium tier gating the deeper stats — every metric is available the second the page loads.
Pro Tips for Hitting Word Counts
- Draft roughly ten percent over a word limit, then cut — trimming excess reads far better than padding thin text.
- Timing a speech? Trust the speaking estimate over the reading one, and slow down further for technical material.
- Glance at the keyword list before publishing; an accidental favorite word repeated eight times jumps out to readers too.
- If the sentence count barely moves while the word count climbs, your sentences are running long — split a few.
Frequently asked questions
How are reading and speaking times calculated?
Reading time assumes 225 words per minute, the average pace of an adult reading silently; speaking time uses 130 words per minute, the deliberate pace recommended for speeches and presentations. Both display down to the second, so a 300-word toast shows about two minutes twenty seconds of talking time.
Does the character count include spaces?
Yes — the character figure counts every keystroke, spaces and punctuation included, which is exactly how X's 280-character limit, meta-description budgets, and most form fields measure text. Watch for submission systems that specify "characters without spaces"; those are rarer but do appear in academic abstract guidelines.
What does the keyword panel show?
It ranks the ten words you've used most often, filtering out common stop words like "the" and "because" so the list reflects your actual vocabulary. Writers use it two ways: catching a crutch word repeated a dozen times per page, and confirming an article's target SEO keyword actually appears more often than incidental vocabulary does.
How does it decide what counts as a sentence or paragraph?
Sentences are split on terminal punctuation — periods, question marks, exclamation points — followed by a space, while paragraphs are blocks separated by blank lines. Pasting from some editors collapses or doubles line breaks, so if the paragraph figure looks off, check how your source formatted its breaks.
How does the passive voice detection work?
The counter flags sentences pairing a form of "to be" or "to get" with a past participle — "the report was written," "mistakes were made." It's a heuristic, so an occasional descriptive phrase may slip through or get flagged, but as a revision signal it works: if a quarter of your sentences light up, your prose will read stronger recast in active voice.
What do the social media limit bars measure?
Each bar compares your total character count (spaces included) against a platform's cap: 280 for a Twitter/X post, 150 for an Instagram bio, 3,000 for a LinkedIn post, 160 for an SEO meta description, and 60 for a title tag. A bar turns red the moment you exceed a limit and shows exactly how many characters to cut.