Word Counter — most accurate online word, character & readability tool

A word count is rarely just a number. Editors, teachers, search engines and social platforms all reward hitting the right length — and penalise missing it. A blog post that runs too thin struggles to rank; an essay that goes over the limit loses marks; a meta description that overshoots ~160 characters gets truncated in Google. Counting your words as you write keeps every piece inside its target range before it costs you.

For SEO, length is a proxy for depth: long-form pages of 1,500–2,500 words tend to earn more backlinks and rank for more keywords — but only when the words are genuinely useful. For students, most assignments specify a word range and mark down work that falls outside it. For authors and journalists, publishers and outlets commission by the word. And for marketers, every platform truncates copy at a hard character limit. A live word and character counter turns all of that from guesswork into a number you can watch.

These are conventions, not rules — always follow the brief you were given first. When there is no brief, aim for the shortest length that completely answers the reader's question.

A word counter splits text on word boundaries and counts the words — the metric editors, teachers and publishers care about. A character counter counts every character, with or without spaces — the metric that matters whenever a platform enforces a hard cap, such as a tweet, an SMS or a meta description. This tool is both at once: every keystroke updates words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, lines, syllables and unique words together, so you never have to switch between a word counter and a character counter.

Which should you watch? Use the word count for essays, articles, blog posts and manuscripts. Use the character count for social captions, ad headlines, SEO titles and meta descriptions, SMS, and anywhere a field shows "N characters remaining".

Astra's Word Counter is built around two pillars of accuracy. First, the browser's native Intl.Segmenter API, which implements the Unicode UAX #29 text segmentation algorithm — the same standard used by Word, Google Docs and every serious NLP toolkit. Second, Titus Wormer's syllable library for true syllable counts.

What that means in practice

• Hyphenated words like state-of-the-art count as one word, not three.
• Contractions like don't count as one word.
• Abbreviations like Dr., U.S.A., e.g. don't break sentence boundaries.
• CJK text is segmented at the script's natural boundaries.
• URLs and emails stay as single tokens.
• Emoji are counted as one grapheme each.

Six readability formulas

• Flesch Reading Ease — 206.835 − 1.015·(W/S) − 84.6·(Syl/W). Higher is easier.
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade — 0.39·(W/S) + 11.8·(Syl/W) − 15.59. US school grade.
• SMOG Index — 1.0430·√(poly·30/S) + 3.1291. Years of education.
• Gunning Fog — 0.4·((W/S) + 100·(complex/W)).
• Coleman-Liau — 0.0588·L − 0.296·S − 15.8.
• Automated Readability Index (ARI) — 4.71·(chars/W) + 0.5·(W/S) − 21.43.

Privacy

• Your text never leaves the browser. Everything runs locally.
• Auto-save uses localStorage in your browser only.
• The syllable library is fetched from jsDelivr once and cached by your browser after the first visit.