Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with wordcount

Is there some sort of service that will tell you how long it will take to read a certain number of words?

rileyray3000 — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 09:49:41 -0800

Giving a speech filter: IS there any online service or program that you can put in a block of text and it will tell approximately you how long it'll take to read it out loud? So I'm giving a speech next week that's got to be five minutes long. I'm usually better at writing these things out ahead of time. And I have no problem with the public speaking. I just want to know how many words I should shoot for with five minutes.

I realize I could just record myself and then trim but I really don't want to put in that much effort. It's not a super important speech. Just one that's supposed to go a pretty set time.

So is there any online service that estimates these things? I realize I could always put it in a speech synthesizer and time it but I'm hoping there's something little more cut and paste.

Does this exist?

Word count software

carmen — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:40:30 -0800

Is there a word count program that you can set to measure the number of words typed in a period of time rather than the number of words that appear on the page? I'm doing some editing-heavy stuff, and (mostly for personal satisfaction) I would like to know how many words I'm actually typing in a work session. The first minus last word count doesn't work, because I often delete large paragraphs or sections of inline notes that are no longer needed. It's sometimes discouraging to work steadily for an hour and end up with fewer pages than you started with!

Anyway, I need something that works on a Mac and preferably is not specific to a word processing program. (Although if it's important, I use Mellel.)

What can I use to write my PhD in?

Augenblick — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:38:57 -0800

PhD Filter: First year into my course, one chapter written, MS Word can no longer take the strain. It's a humanities PhD, I need a cheap/free alternative... all help appreciated. I've been using Microsoft Word since the beginning of the Phd and just slightly bankrupted myself on the EndNote software to use as bibliography. Up till now I'd been using Zotero and Word. The amount of references I have in one chapter seems to be throwing Word off entirely, my word count is 20,000 and at around 55 pages, it no longer seems to be functioning. This may be due to the section breaks for some of the tables and figures I have as well.

I've read many previous and similar questions but they seem to be more science based - I don't need anything that can formulate equations. I do need something that could deal with tables however, columns for translation of poetry, and a serious mountain of references. What do other humanities students use? I know lots of people seem to have the same problem re: Word.

What I need is something free or else fairly cheap, easy ish to use (though I am quite techie, and could learn it if necessary). At the very most I could spend about £60.

Looking for a word count widget

(bb|[^b]{2}) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 11:35:28 -0800

Is there a javascript bookmark available that I can nest on my toolbar that will give me a word count for whatever text I have highlighted (in a text box or otherwise)? Or maybe a firefox addon or greasemonkey script that would do the same? I've googled it, but everything I've found is for specific websites (i.e. gmail word count, yelp word count, etc.). I'm looking for something that would work on any website.

How do I do a global wordcount in MT?

Marquis — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 09:22:12 -0800

How do I get a global wordcount for every post made on my MT 2.66 blog? MT Wordcount only seems to have tags for obtaining the number of words in each entry. I want to know the big number that is the total sum for all (558) entries on the blog.

Apparently MTWordStats used to do this, but the plugin's no longer available.

Thanks!

word count on page

reklaw — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 07:08:36 -0800

So I'm trying to write a Word macro to count how many words there are on the current page of the document. It's not going well. It's already taken me quite a while to figure out that the code to get the current page number is Selection.Information(wdActiveEndPageNumber) -- I mean, how intuitive is that? From there it seems that I'd need to use Selection.MoveUp and Selection.MoveDown in a loop and make it stop and reverse when it finds page breaks, but I'm at a loss as to how to do it.

Word Count Information

NotMyselfRightNow — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 12:32:11 -0800

How can I find out the word count of a published book? I'm interested in being able to look up the total word count of a published book (specifically JFK's "Profiles in Courage," but would like to have the ability for other titles as well). Is there anyway I can easily find this out?

How many words on the front page?

TNLNYC — Fri, 20 May 2005 21:33:43 -0800

I've heard many times that if you read the front page of the newspaper, you would have gone through more words than if you listened to a half hour TV broadcast news show. With this in mind, I am wondering: how many words are there, on average on the front page of a newspaper? What about inside? Does the format (broadsheet vs. tabloid) make a difference? If yes, how many words for each?