Do you want to know if you have met the required word count for your writing project? Here are the 7 best free word count tools online.
This article gives a detailed review of The 7 Best Free Word Count Tools Online.
When working on an important writing assignment, such as blog posts, academic documents, or advertisements, we often worry about whether we have met the right word count.
The good thing is that some word processing tools, like Microsoft Word or Google Docs, have a built-in word counting tool.
But if you are working with plain text tools like Notepad or other platforms that don’t offer a free word counter, then you will need to find a way to find out the word count.
This will be the focus of this article. We will highlight some of the best free word count tools online. Some of these tools have additional features that help you analyze your content.
For instance, it can help you find out the number of characters, paragraphs, keyword density, and reading time.
What Is a Word Count Tool?
A word counter is an online tool that helps writers who need to stay within a specified word range on their piece of writing.
This tool counts the total number of words found in a document. But you should note that not all word-counting tools work the same way.
The only similarity is that all of them count the words in a piece of writing. Some tools may count some special features, like numbered lists and bullets, and include them as part of the number of words.
So, when selecting a word count tool, you need to make sure that it delivers accurate results according to the guidelines you are writing under.
The idea of word count requirements is found in academic, legal, advertising, and freelance writing. Some publishers may also specify the word count range for manuscripts.
In the next section, we will see specific examples of professionals who benefit from word count tools.
Who Are the Beneficiaries of a Word Count Tool?
There are several use cases for word count. Basically, anyone who writes in digital format can benefit from a word counter. Below are some of the main groups that benefit from word count tools:
Content Marketers
In most cases, advertisers and content marketers have to work on projects that have specific word count requirements.
An illustration is if you are writing content for social media posts advertising products, which you have to be aware of to ensure that it fits the platform you are working with.
Ad copies are even more strenuous in terms of word count, making a word counter a valuable tool.
Online Content Writers
Most writing projects are priced according to their output, meaning that they must keep track of the number of words they deliver.
Editors of these pieces of writing often love writers who submit content with the correct number of words. Writers who submit written content below the expected word count often have to rework their pieces to fix the shortcomings in terms of word count.
Sometimes, the editors may have to work on the shortage. Either way, meeting word count is a critical factor in online writing. This is where an online word count tool comes in handy.
Students/Teachers
In this age where online learning is almost becoming mainstream, word count can be handy for students and instructors. Students can use this tool to meet assignment requirements.
Lecturers or teachers, too, can use a word count checker to hold their students accountable.
This word-counting tool has an impressive number of counting features. Apart from counting the number of words, it can also help you find out the number of characters, sentences, and paragraphs.
It can also analyze your content and provide a detailed overview of the keyword density. In most cases, the keywords can be grouped into different phrases depending on the number of words, e.g., 1-word, 2-word, and 3-word phrases.
This analysis comes in handy when you want to monitor and optimize your content for search engines. In addition to the above, it can also estimate the total amount of time it will take to read the content you write.
To access the full list of content features in this tool, go to the More option. Here, you will find fantastic features like the average length of sentences, the shortest and longest sentences, and keyword analysis.
This free word count tool has one of the most straightforward interfaces. It is simple to use and has zero clutter, making it easier to upload content and capture word count.
This counter shows statistics about your characters and words. And the best thing about it is that it's completely free. You don’t have to pay to access premium features.
All you need to use this tool is to copy your text and paste it into the provided text field. The word count and character count will appear just below this text box. It is as simple as that.
This is another free word count tool with an extensive list of features to analyze your text. There are so many things that you can achieve with this tool.
First, it allows you to upload files of various formats, including Word, Excel, HTML, txt, CSS, epub, and more. Besides this, you can just copy text from where you were processing it and paste it into the tool.
You are probably wondering how it reads complex text like HTML or CSS. Well, this word count tool removes unnecessary characters like obsolete newlines, HTML tags, and extra spaces to clean the text before counting it.
In terms of the information it can analyze, countwordsfree can count words, characters, paragraphs, sentences, and lines. It also has other extra-nice features, such as punctuation and numerical counters.
One of the unique qualities of this tool is that it accepts uploads in different languages. You can activate this feature in the Settings option.
This word-counting tool has a clean interface and is free to use. Most of the displayed information, such as character count and word count, will appear on the top bar.
Like other tools in this list, it has a paragraph and sentence counter. However there are two additional tools that are absent in most of the listed tools, and those are the grammar checker and page counter.
The page counter lets you know how long the passage is as well as how many pages your content will have.
The grammar-checking feature is very useful, as it allows you to detect and correct grammatical errors as you work on the content.
Like your usual grammar extension, it proofreads your content in American or British English and then gives options and suggestions to rectify mistakes.
An added functionality of this tool is the keyword analyzer. This feature analyzes various keywords in your text for SEO.
This tool has pretty unique features that help you calculate the final word count. Besides this, it analyzes your text by differentiating between standard words and non-words.
For example, it can count the number of real words in your document and then count separately the number of bullets, numbers, email addresses, and codes, among other content types.
But its most unique feature is the Ideogram option, which can analyze difficult-to-read scripts such as Japanese and Chinese words.
If you prefer a simple and easy-to-use tool, then this word count tool by Fossbytes will be ideal. It is one of the few word-counter tools with a clean interface.
We also like it because it can calculate for you the total word count for any amount of text. All you need to do is copy and paste the written text into the tool, and it will automatically calculate the number of words.
Besides this, it also counts the number of sentences, paragraphs, and characters. One of the unique things about this tool is that it can count characters without spaces.
This flexibility is particularly useful when writing meta descriptions and titles for your blog posts, where a character limit is essential.
Many professionals love this free document analysis tool because it can analyze characters, words, lines, and spaces.
With this tool, you can add a single document at a time, so you need to record the word count for each document.
This tool has a Custom Text Analysis feature that lets you analyze different sections of your document. To do so, you have to indicate the starting and endpoints.
The report will contain insights such as word counts, character counts, and many other stats.
Closing Remarks
Whether you fit into one of the above categories of word counter users, chances are that you have specific reasons why you need to know the exact word count.
So, rather than counting it manually, you can take advantage of free technology to achieve the same outcome faster and more efficiently.
They are an essential arsenal for any SEO or content specialist. The best thing is that there are several free word count tools online that you can utilize in your projects, but the ones above are the best.
The good thing is that some of them offer more than word count statistics. So, next time you have a writing project, be sure to use one of the above online word counters to ensure your output meets the expected requirements.
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