About WordLab
A word counter that treats your writing as none of its business.
What WordLab is
WordLab is a free online word counter and text-analysis tool. Paste or type any text and it instantly reports words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, reading time, readability grades, keyword density, and dozens of other statistics — all updating live as you write. It also bundles practical writing utilities: case conversion, duplicate-line removal, line sorting, file import for common document formats, and export of your statistics.
The idea behind it
Most online text tools work the same way: you paste your writing into a box, and it is sent to a server you know nothing about, processed there, and the results are sent back. For a shopping list that hardly matters. For an unpublished manuscript, a legal draft, a medical note, or a confidential business document, it matters a great deal.
WordLab was built on a simple principle: counting your words should not require reading them. Every statistic on this site is computed by JavaScript running inside your own browser tab. There is no analysis server. Your text is not uploaded, logged, or stored anywhere except your own device. If you disconnect from the internet after the page loads, every counter keeps working — which is the easiest way to prove the claim is real rather than marketing copy.
Who it's for
- Students checking essay length and grade-level readability before submission.
- Writers and novelists tracking word-count goals and pacing across drafts.
- Bloggers and SEO editors reviewing keyword density, meta-tag lengths, and heading structure.
- Social media managers fitting copy inside platform character limits.
- Translators and editors who bill or budget by word or character count.
- Speakers estimating how long a script takes to deliver aloud.
- Developers and researchers who need quick token estimates, frequency tables, or lexical statistics.
Our approach to accuracy
We would rather be honest than impressive. Different tools genuinely disagree on counts: word processors, search engines, and counters each define a "word" and a "sentence" slightly differently, and English syllable counting — the input to every readability formula — can only ever be estimated by software. WordLab documents exactly how each number is computed on our Guide page, including where the estimates are soft. When a statistic is approximate, we say so next to it.
How the site is funded
WordLab is free to use, with no accounts and no paywalls. To cover hosting and development, the site may display advertising (such as Google AdSense). Advertising never changes the core promise: ads are loaded alongside the page, but the analysis still happens locally and your text is never transmitted to us or to any advertiser. Details are in our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.
Original work
All explanations, documentation, and code on this site were written for WordLab. The readability formulas we implement (Flesch, Flesch–Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman–Liau, ARI) are long-established published formulas in the public research literature; our implementations and descriptions of them are our own.
Get in touch
Spotted a miscount, have a feature request, or found a bug? We genuinely want to hear about it — see the Contact page.