Word Counter

Different briefs measure different things. Academic limits usually count everything in the body but exclude the reference list, and many allow a ten per cent margin in either direction. Editorial briefs care about shape as much as total: a 900-word feature with one 600-word section reads badly even when the arithmetic is right.

Counting section by section is often more useful than counting the whole thing. Paste one heading's worth of text, note the figure, then move on to the next. That tells you which part has swollen and which one is thin, which is far more actionable than learning that the article is 200 words over.

• Blog post: 600 to 1,200 words is the usual brief for a single-topic article.
• Conference abstract: commonly capped at 250 or 300 words and checked on submission.
• University essay: limits normally exclude the bibliography, while footnote rules vary by department.
• Product description: 50 to 150 words for a listing, longer only where the detail earns its place.

A word is any run of characters separated by whitespace, so hyphenated compounds count once and a numeral counts as a word. Sentences are detected from full stops, question marks and exclamation marks, which handles ordinary prose well but miscounts abbreviations such as approx. or e.g. Paragraphs are separated by blank lines.

Those three figures together describe the rhythm of a draft. Long average sentences suggest clauses that could be split. A paragraph count far lower than the word count divided by eighty usually means the text is running in dense blocks. Neither is wrong, but both are worth noticing before you send the piece anywhere.

The estimate divides your word count by an average silent reading speed for adult prose. It is a planning tool, not a measurement. A reader skimming for one fact moves several times faster; a reader working through unfamiliar terminology moves much slower, and text read aloud runs slower still, closer to 130 words a minute.

Use it when the real constraint is time rather than length. A three-minute lightning talk, a two-minute video script, a newsletter that has to be readable during a commute: in each of those cases you are writing to a duration, and the word count is simply the lever you can pull.