10 Best Word Counter Tools For Your School Paper

Word counter tools help you make sure you’re getting to the word count needed for your school paper. However, they also do quite a lot more these days, as we’ll discuss below. As someone who already graduated with a degree in English, and is now going to grad school for English, I can be the first to tell you that writing essays really sucks, especially getting enough written to meet the pesky word count that teachers throw at you, luckily there are word counter tools to keep track of your word count for you.

Yes, most word processing programs do have their own versions of word counters, but there are times those aren’t reliable or some other word counters have other nifty tools like grammar correcting or even getting statistics about your character counts, words, and even syllables used.

These word counters are also good for teachers or lecturers to copy and paste their students work into to make sure that the student actually wrote the correct amount and didn’t try to skimp out on anything. For this guide, we have included the top 10 word counter tools we could find for your school papers.

I got to take classes in writing with a fountain pen, and actually, something you make is your own textbook. So, while you’re learning about something, you have to write essays on it, and then you handwrite in cursive, in fountain pen, your essays out on beautiful paper and you bind it together into a book that you hand in at the end of the course. – Maya Hawke

The Top 10 Word Counter Tools

Image source: Public domain Pictures

Now, let’s finally go over our top ten word count tools. Most of these programs are free, with the exception of Microsoft Office, which requires a subscription.

1. Word Count Tools

You can use Word Count Tools here.

Word Count Tools is a free tool, as with just about every word counting tool on this list, and this is one of our personal favorites. This tool gives stats about syllables (poly and monosyllabic) used, paragraphs, how many short and long words used, and even spaces used. Any tool that can give that amount of statistical information out for free is good in my book, and it helps users out by teaching them about syllables and things of that natures.

2. Word Count Tool

You can use Word Count Tool here for free.

We really like this word count tool because it is quick and to the point. All you need to do is copy your work into the box and it will tell you what your word count is. It is really that simple. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that some of the other word counting tools have, but it is very quick and easy.

3. Word Counter

You can use Word Counter for free here.

Word Counter is a really cool tool that actually allows you to use it as a word processor that will count your words and check your grammar for you. As an added bonus, you can also check for plagiarism with Word Counter. Another great thing about Word Counter is that it catches and counts keywords in your work and notifies you if you are overusing a specific word. That way you can change that word up and not use it as much. Overall, Word Counter is a great tool and is definitely something to check out.

4. Easy Word Count

You can use Easy Word Count here.

We like Easy Word Count (EWC for short) because it not only counts the words in your essay, but it can also measure what your typing speed is. Sort of. Technically all the word counting tools on this list can do it, but EWC advertises it, so we figured we will also include it. You can time yourself for a specific period of time (they say five minutes, but theoretically you can do 3 to 5 minutes) and simply type for that time period. When the time is up, look at how many words you typed and divide it by the minutes typed. So let’s say you typed 500 words in 3 minutes. You would divide 500 by 3, which means you type 166.7 words per minute.

5. Count of Words

You can use Count of Words here for free.

We really like Count of Words because it not only gives what the word count is, but it actually explains the importance of word count and what important document words counts should be. It also explains why word choice in an essay or any writing is important, and overall gives important tips and information for writing. It is really a nice tool to check out and gives great advice to those who aren’t sure about word counts for different works.

6. Word Counter Tool

You can get Word Counter Tool here.

We like Word Counter Tool because it actually gives you real-time counts on both words and character counts. It also calculates typing speed, similar to how Easy Word Count does.

7. Word Counter

You can use Word Count here for free.

Word Counter is really geared more towards social media postings like Twitter and Facebook, but it is still really helpful and useful. It also has a sidebar on the side that gives analytics and information about keywords and information like that.

8. Word Count Tool for Chrome

You can get the word count tool for Google Chrome here for free.

This is actually an extension of Word Count Tools for Google Chrome, and it is an awesome tool. This allows you to highlight any text on your screen and it will give you a word count. It is an awesome tool that is free to use and honestly there is no reason not to have it if you use Chrome.

9. Microsoft Word Word Counter

Word count from Microsoft Word

If you have Microsoft Office Suite, or even if you just have Microsoft Word then you have access to their version of word count. You can see the word count in the picture above from a homework assignment of mine that I am currently working on, it shows how many words there are and if I were to click on that it would actually go more in-depth and show character count, spaces, etc.

10. Google Docs Word Counter

Lastly, if you use Google Docs they have their own built-in version of a word counter that will give you an accurate count of how many words your document has, along with characters and spaces. It is extremely similar to Word’s word counter (to the point where I cannot tell a difference between the two).