Word counter

What is being counted, exactly

Words are runs of letters and digits, so hyphenated compounds and words with apostrophes count as one. "Twenty-one" is one word; "don't" is one word. Numbers count. This matches what a word processor does and what an editor means when they ask for 800 words.

Characters are counted twice: with spaces, which is what a form limit almost always means, and without, which is what typesetters and some academic limits mean.

Sentences end at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, or at a blank line. This over-counts on abbreviations — "Dr. Smith" reads as two sentences — and that matters, because every readability formula divides by the sentence count. Prose with a lot of abbreviations will score as easier than it is.

Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line.

The readability scores, and what they are worth

All six work the same way: they count syllables, words and sentences and put them through a formula fitted to reading tests in mid-twentieth-century American schools. They measure sentence length and word length. That is all they measure.

Flesch reading ease runs 0 to 100, higher is easier. Roughly: 60-70 is plain English and the level most public writing should aim at; 30-50 is dense professional prose; below 30 is legal or academic. It is the one most style guides quote.

Flesch–Kincaid grade, Gunning fog, SMOG, Coleman–Liau and ARI all answer in US school grades. Grade 8 means an average thirteen-year-old could read it. They disagree with each other by two or three grades routinely, which tells you how precise any of them is.

SMOG is defined over thirty sentences. On anything shorter this page extrapolates and says so next to the number.

What the scores cannot see

A readability score cannot tell whether your writing is good, clear, or true. It counts long words and long sentences.

You can improve any of these scores without improving anything else, by chopping sentences arbitrarily and swapping precise words for vague short ones. "Utilise" becomes "use" and the score improves and the writing is better. "Myocardial infarction" becomes "heart problem" and the score improves and the writing is worse.

Use the number as a smoke alarm: an unexpectedly low Flesch score on something meant for the public is worth a second look. Do not use it as a target.

Syllable counting is a heuristic. There is no way to do it correctly without a pronunciation dictionary, and every implementation of these formulas anywhere — including the one in your word processor — uses a rule of thumb. Ours is right about nine times out of ten and predictably wrong on words like "business" and "poem".

Reading and speaking time

Reading time assumes 200 words a minute, which is the middle of the range for silent reading of ordinary prose. Technical material is slower; fiction is faster.

Speaking time assumes 130 words a minute, which is a comfortable, unhurried delivery. Audiobook narration sits around 150. If you are timing a talk, the number here is the one to trust — most people read a script far faster in their head than they will say it out loud, and that is how a fifteen-minute slot becomes twenty-two minutes.

This one is genuinely private

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