Word Counter — Words, Characters, Sentences & Reading Time

A word count answers the obvious question — «is this long enough?» — but the numbers around it tell you more. Character count matters for anything with a hard limit: a meta description, a tweet, a LinkedIn headline, a university abstract capped at 250 words. Sentence and paragraph counts, and especially average sentence length, are a quick readability signal: long average sentences are the single most common reason English «reads heavy», and they are doubly common for non-native writers who carry longer sentence structures over from their first language.

This counter flags every sentence over 40 words. A 40+ word sentence is not wrong, but if several pile up the reader loses the thread. When a sentence trips the flag, look for the join — usually an «and», «which», or a comma where a full stop would do — and split it. Shorter sentences are clearer in English even in formal and academic writing, where many languages favour a single long, subordinate-clause-heavy sentence.

Everything here runs locally in your browser. Your text is never uploaded, stored, or sent to a server — paste a draft, a confidential email, or an unpublished manuscript without worry. When you want the next step — fixing the long sentences, tightening the grammar, or making the whole thing sound less translated — that is where Diglot's editor comes in.

Most word counts are run against a specific ceiling, and the ceilings are rarely round numbers. Admissions and academic work: a Common App personal essay is capped at 650 words, a UCAS personal statement at 4,000 characters, a journal abstract usually at 150–300 words, and a statement of purpose commonly at 500–1,000.

Everyday professional limits are shorter than people expect: a meta description is cut around 155 characters, a LinkedIn headline stops at 220, a post on X at 280, and a cover letter is expected to stay on one page — roughly 350–400 words. Characters and words are not interchangeable here: English averages about 5–6 characters per word including the space, which is why a 4,000-character limit lands near 650–700 words rather than 800.

Page counts depend entirely on formatting, so treat any conversion as an estimate. The common academic default — 12pt, double-spaced, 1-inch margins — gives roughly 250 words per page. Single-spaced, the same settings hold about 500. So 1,000 words is about four double-spaced pages or two single-spaced; a 5,000-word dissertation chapter is around twenty double-spaced pages.

If a brief specifies pages rather than words, ask which formatting it assumes before you write to the number — the same 2,000 words can land anywhere between four and eight pages depending on spacing, font and margins.

Microsoft Word shows a live count in the status bar; if it is hidden, right-click the bar and tick Word Count. Review → Word Count opens the full breakdown, and there is a checkbox for whether footnotes and endnotes are included — which matters, because many academic limits exclude them. Google Docs is Tools → Word count (⌘/Ctrl+Shift+C), with an option to keep the count on screen while typing. Pages puts it under View → Show Word Count.

Two gotchas make these disagree with a submission system. Selecting text counts only the selection, which is how people accidentally report a fragment. And the tools differ on what counts — headings, captions, footnotes, reference lists — so a draft that passes in Word can be rejected by a portal. Pasting the exact text you are submitting into a neutral counter removes that ambiguity.

These are one tool under several names, and the name people reach for depends on what they are checking. A word counter or word count tool is usually being asked «am I over the limit?». A words checker is usually asked mid-draft — «how long is this so far, and is anything obviously wrong with it?» — which is why the count and the long-sentence flag sit side by side here rather than on separate pages.

A character counter is a different ceiling for the same text: platforms cap characters, institutions cap words, and the two do not convert cleanly, because English averages roughly 5–6 characters per word once spaces are counted. All four numbers update as you type, so you never have to decide up front which one you needed.