How word counting works
The counter scans your text for sequences of word characters — letters, digits, and apostrophes. Each unbroken sequence is one word. Whitespace, punctuation (other than apostrophes), and hyphens all act as word boundaries.
A few specific cases worth knowing:
- Contractions: “don’t”, “it’s”, “we’re” each count as one word.
- Hyphenated compounds: “well-known” and “up-to-date” split at the hyphen and count as two or three words respectively.
- Numbers: “3.14” and “2026” each count as one word.
- Punctuation-only lines: dashes, asterisks, or decorative separators do not add to the word count.
Reading time and speaking time
Reading time assumes 200 words per minute — a commonly used average for adult readers working through general prose. Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, which is closer to a comfortable presentation pace.
Both figures are rounded to the nearest second and displayed as “X min Y sec”.
Example: a 200-word paragraph
A passage of exactly 200 words produces a reading time of 1 min 0 sec and a speaking time of roughly 1 min 32 sec.
For comparison, a standard novel chapter runs 3,000 to 5,000 words — about 15 to 25 minutes to read aloud. A three-minute speech at a comfortable pace contains approximately 400 words.
Most common word
The counter identifies the most frequently used word in your text, skipping over common function words (the, and, of, is, a, etc.) that appear in almost every passage and carry little meaning. What remains is the content word that recurs most — useful for spotting unintentional repetition when editing. For the full breakdown of word, bigram, and trigram frequencies, the keyword density analyzer is the next step up; for sentence-level complexity scores, the readability checker covers that axis.
The frequency check is case-insensitive: “Apple”, “apple”, and “APPLE” all count toward the same total.