Guides
The tools answer in a number. These answer in prose — what the number means, where it comes from, and when it cannot be trusted.
Every question below is one somebody arrives at this site already asking. How many words fit in five minutes of speech. Whether a bibliography counts toward a limit. Why two counters looking at the same document produce two different numbers.
A calculator can give you a figure for any of those. It cannot tell you whether the figure applies to your situation, and that is usually the part that decides whether you submit something acceptable. These pages cover the conventions, the places institutions disagree with each other, and the cases where the obvious answer is wrong.
None of them will write anything for you. This site measures text you have already written and reports the distance to a target; closing that distance is your work, and these guides are about doing it with the right information rather than a guess.
- How many words is a 5-minute speech?The word count for any speech length, and how to find your own speaking rate.
- How many pages is 2,000 words?The words-to-pages conversion, the variables that move it, and how to measure your own.
- What counts toward an essay word limit?Which parts of an essay count, which do not, and how to find your institution's actual rule.
- How long does it take to read 1,000 words?Silent, aloud and fast-reading times from 300 words to 10,000.
- How to cut an essay to the word limitThe order to cut in, what each technique recovers, and the cuts that lose marks.
- Why word counts differ between toolsWhere counting rules split, and which count decides when a limit is enforced.