Word Counter
Count words, characters, and analyze text readability. Check social media character limits and get detailed readability scores.
Text Statistics
Social Media Character Limits
Readability Scores
Enter at least 10 words and 1 sentence to calculate readability scores.
Understanding Text Readability
Readability Scores Explained
| Score | What It Measures | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Flesch Reading Ease | Overall readability (0-100) | General content, marketing |
| Flesch-Kincaid Grade | US school grade level | Educational materials |
| SMOG Index | Years of education needed | Healthcare, technical docs |
| Coleman-Liau | Grade level by characters | Academic writing |
| Automated Readability | Grade level (character-based) | Technical documents |
Flesch Reading Ease Scale
| Score | Difficulty | Audience |
|---|---|---|
| 90-100 | Very Easy | 5th grade |
| 80-89 | Easy | 6th grade |
| 70-79 | Fairly Easy | 7th grade |
| 60-69 | Standard | 8th-9th grade |
| 50-59 | Fairly Difficult | 10th-12th grade |
| 30-49 | Difficult | College |
| 0-29 | Very Difficult | College graduate |
Social Media Character Limits
- Twitter/X: 280 characters per tweet (was 140 until 2017)
- Instagram: 2,200 characters per caption (first 125 shown before "more")
- LinkedIn: 3,000 characters for posts, 120 for headline
- Facebook: 63,206 characters for posts (optimal: 40-80)
- YouTube: 100 characters for title, 5,000 for description
- TikTok: 2,200 characters for captions
How the Counts Are Calculated
Word count is determined by splitting your text on whitespace, so hyphenated compounds like "well-known" count as one word and numbers count the same as words. Sentences are detected at periods, question marks, and exclamation points; paragraphs at blank lines. Syllables are estimated by counting vowel groups after trimming silent endings — a well-established heuristic that is accurate enough for readability scoring, though English being English, individual words can be off by a syllable.
Reading time assumes an average silent reading pace of 200 words per minute, and speaking time assumes 150 words per minute, a comfortable presentation pace. These figures are useful for planning: a five-minute conference talk holds roughly 750 spoken words, while a "3 min read" label on a blog post corresponds to about 600 words.
The readability panel needs at least ten words and one complete sentence before it activates, because the formulas divide by sentence and word counts and produce meaningless numbers on tiny samples. For a stable score, paste at least a full paragraph — the longer the sample, the more the individual formulas converge.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is reading time calculated?
Reading time divides your word count by 200 words per minute, a widely used estimate for adult silent reading of general-purpose text. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, a comfortable pace for presentations and voiceovers. Dense technical material is read more slowly, so treat both figures as planning estimates rather than guarantees.
Why do different word counters give slightly different numbers?
Tools disagree on edge cases: whether hyphenated compounds are one word or two, whether standalone numbers and URLs count, and how em dashes and slashes are treated. This counter splits on whitespace, so "state-of-the-art" is one word and "3.14" is one word. For essays and assignments, check which tool your institution uses, since counts can differ by a few percent.
Do spaces and punctuation count toward social media character limits?
Yes. Every platform counts spaces, punctuation, and line breaks against the limit. Some platforms also count certain characters as more than one — X (Twitter), for example, counts most emoji as two characters — so a post near the limit may need a little extra headroom.
What is a good Flesch Reading Ease score for web content?
Most general-audience web writing aims for a score of 60 or above, which corresponds roughly to an 8th or 9th grade reading level. Marketing copy often targets 70 or higher. Academic and legal writing routinely scores below 40 — that is expected for its audience, but a low score on a blog post usually means sentences are too long or vocabulary is heavier than it needs to be.
Why are syllable counts approximate?
The tool estimates syllables by counting vowel groups and trimming common silent endings, since no simple rule covers all of English — words like "queue" or "choir" defy pattern-based counting. Across a full paragraph the small per-word errors largely cancel out, which is why readability formulas built on this method remain reliable.
Why do the five readability formulas give different grade levels?
Each formula weighs different signals: Flesch-Kincaid and SMOG lean on syllables per word, while Coleman-Liau and the Automated Readability Index use characters per word instead. Text with long but phonetically simple words will score differently across them. The Average Grade Level shown combines the four grade-based scores to smooth out these differences.
Related Tools
Need more text processing? Try our Text Case Converter for formatting, Diff Checker to compare texts, or AI Token Calculator for LLM token counts.
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