How LetterToolkit works

Word counting

The Word Counter treats a sequence of letters or numbers as a word and keeps common apostrophes and hyphens inside a word. Repeated spaces, tabs and line breaks do not create extra words. This is a practical counting rule rather than a universal publishing standard, so unusual punctuation can produce small differences compared with another editor.

If a school, publisher or form enforces a strict word limit, use LetterToolkit for drafting and then compare the final count with the system that will receive the text.

To reproduce the rule, see 14 checked examples and the downloadable 15-word test. The examples cover apostrophes, hyphens, dashes, decimals, email addresses, emoji and the limits of counting text without spaces.

Characters, sentences and paragraphs

Character totals count the characters present in the input, with a separate figure available when whitespace is excluded. Sentence counting uses sentence-ending punctuation and non-empty text segments. Paragraphs are separated by blank-line boundaries in the tools that report paragraph totals. Empty input returns zero rather than creating a phantom sentence or paragraph.

Reading and speaking time

These are estimates, not measurements. The main Word Counter currently uses approximately 200 words per minute for reading and 130 words per minute for speaking. The dedicated calculators explain their assumptions and let users work from the word total rather than pretending every person reads or speaks at the same speed.

Text cleaning and formatting

Cleaning tools perform explicit transformations such as collapsing repeated spaces, removing empty lines, changing case, sorting lines or removing duplicates. The input stays visible so the user can inspect the result before copying or downloading it. We avoid silently rewriting meaning when a tool is intended only to change formatting.

Word finder and puzzle tools

The word tools compare user input with a shared English word dataset and then apply deterministic filters such as length, starts with, ends with, contains, fixed positions, required letters and excluded letters. Anagram tools also compare letter counts so duplicate letters are preserved correctly.

The dataset is useful for discovery, but it is not an official tournament dictionary. A word can be present here and still be excluded by a particular game, publisher or regional dictionary.

Word-list source and curation

The search index is based on an open-source English word list, with licensing retained in the project. The site normalizes entries for browser tools and separates the working tools from large generated reference pages. Automatically produced word-detail and pattern pages are not treated as editorial articles simply because they exist.

Privacy model

Core counting, cleaning and word-search interactions run in the browser. The page itself and ordinary assets still make normal web requests, and analytics are loaded only after consent where configured. Writer documents are stored locally in the current browser rather than in a LetterToolkit cloud document account.

Testing and corrections

Core tools are checked against empty input, normal prose, repeated whitespace, punctuation, line breaks and representative Unicode text. Word tools are checked for repeated letters and conflicting filters. If you find a result that does not match the documented rule, send the page address, input and expected result through Contact.

For more detail on editorial review and automated pages, see the Editorial and Tool Quality Policy.