A word counter that comes to your text
Most word counter tools are web pages. You copy the paragraph, switch to a browser tab, paste it into a box, read the number and switch back. Do that twenty times while trimming an abstract or a cover letter and the counting takes longer than the editing.
Word Counter Widget reverses the trip. It sits in the notification area and watches for two things: text you copy, and text you select. Highlight a passage in a document, an email, a browser page or a chat window, hold still for a moment, and a small card shows the words, characters, characters with spaces and paragraphs. The card never steals focus and lets clicks pass through it, so the selection you were working on stays highlighted.
Selection counting relies on Windows UI Automation, which most mainstream apps support. Where an app does not expose its text that way, copying it still works.
Character counter for posts, texts, titles and meta descriptions
Under Write to a length, pin the limit you are writing to and the counter switches from a plain total to the room you have left. The presets cover a 280-character social post, a 160-character text message, a 155-character meta description, a 60-character page title and a 3,000-character professional network post. Your own target can be set in words or in characters, such as 1,500 words for an essay.
Go over and the readout flips from, say, 12 characters left to 9 characters over, on the card as well as in the window, so you know exactly how much to cut. For SEO work that saves a round trip to a separate length checker every time you rewrite a title.
Words to minutes: reading time and speaking time
Every count carries two time estimates. Speaking time assumes 150 words a minute, a comfortable pace for a talk or a video script. Reading time uses the Reading speed you set, anywhere from 150 to 400 words a minute; it starts at 238, a typical adult silent-reading rate. Select a draft speech and you know whether it runs three minutes or six before you rehearse it.
English passages of ten words or more also get a Flesch-Kincaid grade level, the school grade at which the text reads comfortably. It is a quick check on whether a support article or a letter is pitched where you meant it.
How to count words in apps without a built-in counter
Plenty of places you write have no counter at all: a web form, a messaging app, a content management system, an email reply. With Count what I select on, highlighting the text is all it takes. Count what I copy covers anything else. Copy a revised draft of that passage and the card marks the words you added and the words you cut, which is handy when an editor asks for 200 fewer.
The window keeps your five most recent copies with their counts, so you can compare an old version against a new one without pasting either anywhere.
