#text stats

Every writer knows this frustration.

You’re working on a draft — maybe a blog post, an essay, or a client deliverable. You need to check the character count because your meta description can’t exceed 160 characters, or because your editor wants exactly 500 words.

So you do the dance: Ctrl+C, open a new tab, find an online word counter, Ctrl+V, wait for the page to load, check the number, close the tab, go back to writing.

It’s not just annoying — it breaks your flow. And if you’re working with sensitive content (client drafts, personal essays, academic papers), you also have to wonder: where exactly is my text being sent right now? Most online word counters run on external servers. You paste your text, and it goes… somewhere. For writers, editors, and students working with confidential material, that’s a real problem.

I got tired of this dance. So I built Text Stats — Word & Character Counter, a Chrome extension that solves both problems at once.

What it does:

⚡ Instant text statistics. Select any text on a webpage, click the icon (or press Alt+W), and you immediately see: word count, character count (with/without spaces), estimated reading time.

🔒 100% private and offline. Your text never leaves your device. No servers, no analytics, no tracking. Everything is processed locally.

📊 Advanced stats on demand. Toggle a switch and get: number of sentences, paragraphs, average word length, average sentence length, longest/shortest sentences, unique words.

🌍 CJK character counting. It correctly handles Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters — something most word counters get completely wrong.

🌗 Automatic dark mode and 11 languages supported.

Why it matters:

If you’re a writer, you stop breaking your flow to check word counts. If you’re an SEO specialist, you quickly check meta description lengths or title tag character counts without leaving the page. If you’re a student, you hit your assignment word limits without copy-pasting into random websites. And if you’re anyone who cares about privacy, you know exactly where your text is — on your device, and nowhere else.

Try it out:

Search for "Text Stats" in the Chrome Web Store, or find it directly here: Text Stats on Chrome Web Store. It’s free, has no ads, and requires no sign-up.

According to Amazon’s great Text Stats feature, the median length for all books is about 64,000 words. The figure was found through looking at a number of books’ text stats, until Brave New World‘s 64,531 word count landed in the exact center of all books–50% of books have fewer words and 50% of books have more words. PWxyz isn’t sure how useful this information is, but because we secretly like math, we’re all for injecting objective truths into subjective fields like literature. (Which is why things like this happen.) But it is nice to know, when you pick up a book and feel its weight, where it stands in relation to all others. Anyway, here’s a sampling of classics and where their word counts land them on the spectrum.