How is average word length calculated?

Count the letters in every word and divide by the number of words. Example: "The cat sat on the mat." has 6 words and 3+3+3+2+3+3 = 17 letters, so the average is 17 ÷ 6 = 2.83 letters per word. Punctuation around words is not counted.

What is the average word length in English?

About 4.7–5 letters per word in running text. Peter Norvig's analysis of 744 billion words from Google Books found 4.79 letters per word counting every occurrence, and 7.60 letters per distinct word, because short words such as "the", "of" and "and" are used far more often than long ones.

Does punctuation count toward word length?

No. Commas, periods, quotes and brackets around a word are stripped. By default apostrophes and hyphens inside a word are not counted either, so "don't" is 4 letters and "well-known" is 9. Turn on "Count apostrophes & hyphens" if you want them counted as characters.

Are numbers and accented letters counted?

Yes. Digits count as characters (as in the Automated Readability Index), and letters from any alphabet — é, ß, ñ, Cyrillic, Greek — count as one letter each, so "café" is 4 letters.

What is a good average word length for readability?

For a general audience about 4.5 to 5 letters per word reads easily. Below 4.3 is very plain, conversational or children's text; above 5.5–6 signals dense academic, legal or technical writing. Sentence length matters as much: aim for an average under about 20 words per sentence.

How are syllables per word estimated?

With English rules: count groups of vowels (a, e, i, o, u, y), ignore a silent final "e" and most "-es"/"-ed" endings, and give every word at least one syllable. This matches dictionary counts for most words but can be off by one on some, so treat syllable-based scores as estimates for English text.

How does word length affect readability scores?

Every classic formula uses it. Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch–Kincaid use syllables per word; the Automated Readability Index and Coleman–Liau use characters or letters per word; LIX uses the share of words longer than six letters. Longer words and longer sentences both push the grade level up.

Is my text sent to a server?

No. All analysis happens entirely in your browser. Your text never leaves your device.

Average Word Length Calculator

Paste text to see the average word length in letters (and syllables), median and longest words, words per sentence, the share of long words and five readability scores that are built on word and sentence length. Typical English prose averages about 4.8 letters per word.

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Average Word Length

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letters per word

Words

Total Letters

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Median Length

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Std. Deviation

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Syllables / Word

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Words / Sentence

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Long Words (7+)

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Avg of Unique Words

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Shortest Word

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Longest Words

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Readability (word & sentence length based)

Formula	Score	Meaning

Syllable-based scores (Flesch, Flesch–Kincaid) use an English syllable estimate; ARI, Coleman–Liau and LIX need only letters, words and sentences.

Word Length Distribution

Formulas used

Average word length = letters ÷ words
Flesch Reading Ease = 206.835 − 1.015 × (words ÷ sentences) − 84.6 × (syllables ÷ words)
Flesch–Kincaid Grade = 0.39 × (words ÷ sentences) + 11.8 × (syllables ÷ words) − 15.59
Automated Readability Index = 4.71 × (characters ÷ words) + 0.5 × (words ÷ sentences) − 21.43
Coleman–Liau Index = 0.0588 × L − 0.296 × S − 15.8, where L = letters per 100 words and S = sentences per 100 words
LIX = words ÷ sentences + 100 × (words longer than 6 letters ÷ words)

Worked example: "The cat sat on the mat." → 6 words, 17 letters, 1 sentence, 6 syllables. Average word length = 17 ÷ 6 = 2.83 letters; Flesch Reading Ease = 206.835 − 1.015 × 6 − 84.6 × 1 = 116.1 (very easy).

Reference values

Measure	Value
English running text (Google Books, 744 bn words)	4.79 letters / word
English distinct words (same corpus)	7.60 letters / word
Flesch 90–100 / 60–70 / 30–50 / 0–30	Very easy / plain English / difficult / very difficult
LIX < 30 / 30–40 / 40–50 / 50–60 / > 60	Very easy / easy / medium / difficult / very difficult
ARI, Flesch–Kincaid, Coleman–Liau	≈ US school grade (8 ≈ age 13–14)

Corpus figures: Peter Norvig, "English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited".

Summary

Average word length is the total number of letters divided by the number of words. The calculator splits text on spaces, strips punctuation around each word, and counts letters and digits with full Unicode support (accented and non-Latin letters count). Apostrophes and hyphens inside words are excluded by default and can be included with one switch. It also estimates English syllables per word, counts sentences, and feeds these into the Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch–Kincaid Grade, Automated Readability Index, Coleman–Liau Index and LIX formulas. For reference, Peter Norvig's count of 744 billion words of Google Books text gives 4.79 letters per running word and 7.60 letters per distinct word.

How it works

Paste or type your text — results update as you type.
Each whitespace-separated token is stripped of surrounding punctuation; tokens with no letters or digits are ignored.
Average word length = total letters (and digits) ÷ number of words. Turn on "Count apostrophes & hyphens" to include them.
Sentences are counted at . ! ? and line breaks; syllables are estimated with English vowel-group rules.
Readability formulas combine letters, syllables, words and sentences; the distribution chart shows how many words have each length.

Use cases

Assess vocabulary complexity and readability level of an article or essay.
Compare writing style complexity across different authors or documents.
Check whether content is appropriate for a target reading level.
Analyze academic or legal texts to quantify linguistic density.
Optimize marketing copy by monitoring average word length for clarity.
Build features for stylometry or text-classification experiments.

Frequently Asked Questions

Last updated: 2026-10-10 · Reviewed by Nham Vu