Text Statistics

How to use 3 steps

Paste your Text.
Press Analyse.
Read the counts, reading time and most-used words.

Text

Statistics

Reading time uses 200 words per minute and speaking time 130, both common averages for adult English prose. They are estimates, not measurements of how any particular person reads.

How this tool works

Characters are counted by code point rather than by storage unit, so an emoji or a character outside the basic range counts as one rather than two. Words are runs separated by whitespace. Lines are counted after line endings are normalised. Paragraphs are blocks separated by at least one blank line. Everything is counted on the text exactly as pasted, including any trailing spaces you may not be able to see.

Sentence counting is a heuristic on full stops, question marks and exclamation marks, which is the honest description of every sentence counter that is not a language model. Reading time uses two hundred words per minute and speaking time a hundred and thirty, both rounded and never reported as zero when there are words present. The second table compares your character count against four common limits so you can see at a glance what fits.

How to read the numbers

Sentence counts are approximate: abbreviations, decimal numbers, ellipses and initials all end in a full stop, and each one is counted as a sentence ending. Treat the figure as a guide, not a fact.
Reading and speaking speeds are averages: two hundred words a minute is typical for silent reading of ordinary prose. Dense or technical writing is slower, and a rehearsed script read aloud is slower still.
The longest word is whatever survives a whitespace split: attached punctuation, a URL or a hyphenated compound will win, because none of them contain a space.
The limits table compares total characters: including spaces, which is how meta descriptions and page titles are measured, though search engines truncate by rendered width rather than by character count.

Which numbers are exact and which are estimates

Worth separating, because they are usually presented together as though they carried the same authority.

Exact: character count with and without spaces, line count, paragraph count. These are counting operations with no judgement in them.

Close enough: word count. Splitting on whitespace is right almost always and disagrees with a human on hyphenated compounds, contractions and numbers with separators. Different tools give slightly different totals for the same text and none of them is wrong.

Estimated: sentence count and reading time. The [msm_tool slug="text-statistics"] reports both and neither is a measurement.

Sentence counting is a heuristic

Sentences are detected by looking for terminal punctuation. That works until it meets ordinary English:

Abbreviations. "Dr. Smith arrived at 5 p.m." reads as three sentences.
Decimals. "It costs 3.50" contains a full stop that ends nothing.
Ellipses. Three dots, one or three sentence endings depending on the implementation.
Text with no punctuation at all — a list, a set of headings — reads as one enormous sentence.

Treat the sentence count as approximate. It is useful for comparing two drafts and not for reporting a figure to anyone.

Reading time is arithmetic on an assumption

The figure is word count divided by an assumed rate — here 200 words per minute, which is a common average for adult silent reading of general prose.

Real rates vary enormously. Technical material is read far slower. A skim-reader moves at several times that. Someone reading in a second language, or with dyslexia, or on a phone in a noisy place, moves slower again. The number describes an average reader who may not exist in your audience.

It is fine as a rough signal on an article — a useful hint that a piece is a five-minute read rather than a twenty-minute one. It is not a measurement, and treating a difference between four and five minutes as meaningful reads more into it than is there.

Where the counts genuinely matter

Character limits are the case where exactness counts, and they are unforgiving:

Meta descriptions — roughly 155–160 characters before truncation, though search engines truncate by pixel width rather than character count, so a description full of wide letters is cut sooner.
Title tags — around 60 characters, same caveat.
Social posts — hard limits that reject rather than truncate.
SMS — 160 characters, and 70 if the message contains any non-Latin character, because the encoding changes.
Database fields — where exceeding the limit silently truncates and nobody notices until later.

Word counts as a target are a trap

Writing to hit a word count produces padding. The advice to "write 1,500 words for SEO" has no basis — length correlates with ranking because thorough articles tend to be longer, not because length causes ranking.

Use the count to check whether a piece is roughly the right size for its purpose, and to notice when a section has become disproportionate. Not as a goal.

Nothing is uploaded

The text is analysed in your browser, so pasting an unpublished draft here does not send it anywhere.

Frequently Asked Questions

Specific to the Text Statistics. Broader questions about this category are answered on the category page.

Why is my sentence count wrong?

Full stops in abbreviations, decimals and initials look identical to sentence endings. The count is a heuristic and will read those as sentence breaks.

How is reading time calculated?

Words divided by two hundred per minute, rounded, with a floor of one minute. Speaking time uses a hundred and thirty words per minute.

Does the character count match the one on X?

Not always. Some platforms weight certain characters and ranges differently, so use this as a close estimate rather than a guarantee.

Are spaces included in the character count?

Both figures are given — one with spaces and one without — because different limits are measured in different ways.

Do emoji count as one character?

Counting is by code point, so a simple emoji counts as one. Emoji built by joining several code points together count as their number of parts.