From college essays to LinkedIn captions, word counts are silent gatekeepers. Knowing the targets — and the metrics that matter — is half the writing job.
Google this topic and you will get a hundred answers, half of them wrong. Here is the version that holds up. From college essays to LinkedIn captions, word counts are silent gatekeepers. Knowing the targets — and the metrics that matter — is half the writing job.
Reading time (min) ≈ word count / 200 (adult reading speed)
Most counters split on whitespace — hyphenated terms count as one. URLs usually count as one 'word' too.
Twitter/X: characters. SEO meta description: ~160 chars no spaces. Print typesetting: words and characters both.
Adults average 200 wpm aloud, 250–300 wpm silently. Multiply your word count by 5 to get rough total characters.
Cutting 20% of words usually improves clarity. Test by reading aloud — anything that trips your tongue trips the reader's eye.
Does the counter include hidden text? Most do not strip HTML — paste plain text for clean numbers.
Why do Google Docs and Word disagree by a few? Different rules for hyphenated words, em-dashes and bracketed asides. Treat both as estimates.
If you only remember one thing from this post, make it that the inputs matter more than the calculator. Try the Word Counter linked above to put these numbers to work right now.