Write to a target with confidence. Pick your essay type — Common App, IELTS, TOEFL, or UCAS 2026 — and a live progress bar tracks your words and characters against the exact limit.
Need a word-frequency breakdown, sentence and paragraph counts, or PDF / Word upload? Use the full Word Counter, or check any limit on the limits cheat sheet.
Choose a preset — Common App 650, UCAS 2026, IELTS Task 1 or Task 2, TOEFL Academic Discussion — or set a Custom target in words or characters. Each preset knows whether its limit is a maximum you must stay under or a minimum you must clear.
Type directly or paste your essay into the box. Words and characters update on every keystroke, counted the same Unicode-aware way as the main Word Counter, so contractions and hyphenated words each count once. Nothing is uploaded — the count runs entirely in your browser.
The bar fills as you write and changes colour near the limit: amber as you approach a maximum, red if you go over, green once you clear a minimum. The status line tells you exactly how many words or characters you have left or still need, so you can stop at the right length.
The Common Application personal essay is capped at 650 words, with no minimum — Common App asks only for an essay that fully answers the prompt, though most strong essays land between 500 and 650 words. The online box will not accept more than 650, so trim before you paste. Most strong essays land between 500 and 650 words — depth and focus matter more than hitting the ceiling exactly.
The 2026 UCAS personal statement replaces the single essay with three questions, but keeps the same overall allowance: 4,000 characters including spaces across all three answers. Each answer must be at least 350 characters; past that you can split the 4,000 however suits your course. The questions themselves are not counted. Because the limit is in characters, use the character goal to track your combined total against 4,000.
IELTS Writing Task 1 needs at least 150 words and Task 2 at least 250. Fall short and you lose marks; pad with filler and your coherence score drops. Aim just above each minimum — around 170 and 280 words — so you satisfy the requirement without waffling.
From 2026 the TOEFL iBT writing section no longer has the old Independent essay or the Integrated summary task. It now runs Build a Sentence, Write an Email, and Writing for an Academic Discussion — and the last of those is the only one long enough to write to a word goal. ETS says an effective response contains at least 100 words; about 120–130 is the usual target inside the 10-minute limit. There is no maximum, but the top scores go to complete, well-developed responses, not the shortest ones.
Graduate statements of purpose and scholarship essays often specify their own word or character caps — 500, 800, or 1,000 words are common. Use the Custom goal to enter the exact number from your prompt and keep the live count in view while you edit toward it.
School and university essays usually set a word range with a tolerance of about 10%. Set your assignment's target as a Custom maximum, keep the bar out of the red, and use the cut your word count guide when you need to trim the last hundred words.