Statistics
Top words
Word counters help writers, students, and content creators stay within length requirements. Knowing the word count of a document matters wherever there is a strict limit — academic assignments, grant applications, job descriptions, and press releases all specify target lengths. Blog platforms often recommend minimum word counts for SEO; publishers and editors frequently set maximum counts for submissions.
This tool measures more than just words. It tracks characters with and without spaces (useful for character-limited platforms), sentence count, and paragraph count. Reading time is estimated at 238 words per minute — the commonly cited average adult reading speed for general text — while speaking time uses 130 words per minute for a comfortable presentation pace. Both are estimates; technical content takes longer, simple prose takes less.
The Top Words panel surfaces the most meaningful terms by stripping common stop words — articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs — and showing only words of three or more characters. This highlights the dominant vocabulary of a passage, which is useful for checking whether your writing emphasises the right topics and keywords before publishing.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is reading time calculated?+
Reading time uses an average of 238 words per minute, which is the commonly cited adult reading speed for general text. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, which reflects a comfortable presentation pace. Both are estimates — technical content takes longer; simple prose takes less.
What counts as a word?+
A word is any sequence of word characters (\b\w+\b) — letters, digits, and underscores bounded by non-word characters. Hyphenated words like "well-known" count as two words. Standalone punctuation and symbols do not count.
What counts as a sentence?+
Sentences are split on ., !, and ?. Abbreviations (e.g. "Dr.", "U.S.") may be counted as sentence endings, which can cause the sentence count to be slightly higher than expected for text that uses many abbreviations. If no terminal punctuation is present, the whole text is counted as one sentence.
Why are some common words excluded from Top Words?+
The Top Words panel filters out a list of common stop words — articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs like "the," "and," "is," "in." These words appear at high frequency in all texts and mask the words that carry meaning. Only words of 3 or more characters that are not in the stop list are shown.
Related Tools
How to use
- Paste or type any text into the editor — statistics update instantly.
- Reading time is estimated at 238 words per minute; speaking time at 130 wpm.
- Top words ignores common stop words (the, and, is…) to surface meaningful terms.
- Click Clear to reset the editor.