About CountEvery

CountEvery is a set of text counters that publish their own rules. You paste something in, and it tells you how many words, characters, sentences, vowels and consonants are in it — and, unusually, exactly what it decided about every ambiguous case along the way.

Why it exists

The site began with an argument about a word count. A 650-word application essay came back from a submission form at 664 words, and nothing in either tool explained the gap. It turned out to be hyphens: fourteen hyphenated compounds, split by one counter and kept whole by the other. Neither tool said anywhere what it did with a hyphen.

That is the ordinary condition of online counters. They give you a number with total confidence and no method, and when two of them disagree there is no way to find out which one is answering the question you actually asked. So the design brief here was narrow: show the working. Every rule is written down on the How we count page, every vowel the counter classifies is coloured on screen so you can check it by eye, and the one genuinely contested decision in English letter classification — what to do with Y — is a setting rather than a silent choice.

Who runs it

CountEvery is owned and operated by Taurus Alternative Strategies, LLC, a small company based in Rye Brook, New York. It is a two-person operation, not a venture-funded startup and not a content farm. The counters, the copy and the reference guides are all produced in-house.

We are not affiliated with Microsoft, Google, Apple, Adobe or any of the other software vendors whose behaviour we describe on this site. Where we say what Word or Google Docs does with a hyphen, that is our own testing rather than a statement from the vendor, and it can go out of date when they ship an update. If you find a case where our description is wrong, we would like to know.

How it is paid for

The counters are free, there is no account to create, no paid tier, and no limit on how much text you can paste. The site is funded entirely by advertising served by Google AdSense.

That arrangement has one implication we want to state plainly rather than bury: the ads are served by a third party that sets cookies and, where you have consented to it, personalises what you see. The text you paste into a counter is not part of that and never has been — it is processed in your browser and never transmitted anywhere, to us or to anyone else. The privacy policy sets out exactly what each third party on the page receives.

We do not take payment for editorial coverage, do not publish sponsored posts, and do not accept links in exchange for money. If that ever changes it will be disclosed on this page before it appears anywhere else on the site.

What we get wrong

Some things on this site are estimates and are labelled as such. Syllable counting is algorithmic and gets a small percentage of English words wrong, mostly loanwords and names. Reading time assumes an average reader on ordinary prose and will be badly off for poetry or a spreadsheet. Readability scores were designed in the 1940s for school textbooks and should be read as rough signals, not grades.

Where a number is an approximation, we say so at the point you see it. Where we have made a choice that another reasonable tool makes differently, we say that too. The editorial policy describes how the guides are researched and corrected.

Get in touch

Corrections, disagreements about hyphens, and bug reports are all welcome at hello@countevery.com or through the contact page. We read everything and we answer the ones that need an answer.