Word and character counter
Count words and characters, score how hard the text is to read, and see which phrases you lean on.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded or stored.
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Write at least ten words to score readability.
What this tool does
The counts are the easy part. What makes this useful for editing is the other two panels: how hard the text is to read, and which phrases you keep reaching for.
The readability score uses the Flesch reading ease formula, which weighs sentence length against syllables per word. It is a blunt instrument by design — it cannot tell whether an idea is clear, only whether the sentences carrying it are long. That still catches most of the damage in business writing, because the usual failure is a forty-word sentence with three subordinate clauses rather than an unclear idea.
How to use it while editing
Fix the longest sentence first. The tool flags it when it goes past twenty-five words. Splitting that one sentence usually moves the score more than rewriting a whole paragraph, and it costs a minute.
Read the repeated phrases as a summary. If someone read only your top five two-word phrases, would they know what the page is about? On a page that ranks well, they usually would. If your list is full of filler like “in order” and “one of”, the page has not committed to a subject yet.
Watch the ratio, not the count. Twelve hundred words is not better than six hundred. But six hundred words in nine sentences is a warning: that is a sixty-six word average, and nobody finishes those paragraphs.
Questions
What is a good readability score?
Most publishers aim for 60 to 70 on the Flesch scale, which reads as plain, comfortable prose. Technical writing for a specialist audience sits happily in the 40s. Below 30 the text is dense enough that most readers stop, regardless of how interested they were.
How is reading time calculated?
At 220 words per minute, which is a typical silent reading speed for adults on screen. Treat it as a comparison between drafts rather than an absolute promise.
Is keyword density still an SEO factor?
Not as a target to hit. Nobody at Google is counting your percentages, and writing to a density number produces worse text. It is still useful as a mirror — it shows which phrases you actually leaned on, which is often not the phrase you meant to write about.
Why are common words excluded?
Because "the" is always the most frequent word in English and tells you nothing. You can switch the filter off if you need the raw counts, for example when checking a text against a strict character budget.
Does my text get uploaded?
No. The analysis runs in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, logged or stored.