Longest Word Finder
Find the longest and shortest words and calculate the average word length.
Longest Word Finder
Paste any text and this tool instantly identifies the longest and shortest words it contains, along with the average word length. This is useful for analyzing writing style, readability, and complexity. Writers often use word length as a stylistic device—short, punchy words create a fast pace, while longer words can convey formality or technical precision.
The tool counts words by matching a Unicode letter pattern that preserves apostrophes and hyphens, so contractions like "don't" and hyphenated compounds like "well-being" are handled correctly. Measured in code points, so characters with diacritics (é, ñ, ü) count as individual letters. The average is displayed as a decimal to one place, giving you precise insights into your text's vocabulary profile.
Use it to assess readability before submitting academic papers, test email copy for conversational tone, or check whether your fiction matches a target word-length range. Compare the average across multiple passages to spot stylistic drift. All processing runs locally in your browser, so no text is uploaded or stored anywhere. The tool works with any language, measures length in Unicode code points so accented letters and emoji are counted correctly, and ignores surrounding punctuation when it isolates each word, so hyphenated and apostrophised words are handled as you would expect.