Guides

Guides to counting text

Reference material on length, limits and legibility — written to be checked rather than skimmed.

The counters answer how many. These pages answer the questions that come immediately afterwards: how many pages that is, whether it will fit, how long it takes to read aloud, and why the number on the submission form is different from the one you were just looking at.

They are written to be checked rather than skimmed. Where a figure comes from research, the research is named. Where it comes from our own testing, the page says when we tested. Where the honest answer is that nobody agrees — how long a blog post should be, whether Y is a vowel — the guide says so instead of inventing a rule. Our editorial policy describes how that works in practice and how corrections are handled.

Length and limits

Four references for the question “is this the right size?”, covering words, pages, characters and minutes. Between them they hold about a hundred specific targets, from a meta description to a doctoral thesis.

How many pages is 1,000 words? Conversion tables both ways, for every common font, size and spacing — and why the answer moves so much. Character limits A–Z Forty limits in one table: SMS, meta descriptions, bios, alt text, subject lines, and which are enforced. Word count targets From a haiku to a doctoral thesis, with the reason each convention exists and how much slack it really has. Reading time and speaking time Where 238 words per minute comes from, why 200 is folklore, and how to time a talk properly.

Why the numbers move

Counting text sounds like arithmetic and is mostly definition. These four pages set out the decisions behind every number on this site, where the common tools make different ones, and how much difference each choice actually makes to a real document.

Why word counts disagree Word, Google Docs, Pages and online counters on the same paragraph, with the arithmetic for each gap. How we count Our full specification: every rule, every abbreviation in the list, and which figures are estimates. Readability scores explained What Flesch Reading Ease actually measures, what it cannot see, and how far to trust a grade level. Sentence and paragraph length The averages worth aiming at, and why variation matters more than the average itself.

Letters

Below the word is the letter, and English letters do not map cleanly onto English sounds. These three cover the frequency table everyone half-remembers, the letter that refuses to be classified, and the reason no syllable counter can ever be exact.

Letter frequency in English The A–Z table, where the standard figures come from, and why no two sources agree exactly. Is Y a vowel? Sometimes. The cases where each answer is right, and what our counter does about it. How to count syllables The rules that work, the words that break them, and why every automatic counter is an estimate.