My eldest son is currently completing the final piece of coursework for his A Level English which is looking at the the language used in pre and post watershed TV. To do this he is looking at various measures such as the complexity of words. One of the things he wanted to do was to look at the number of words by the number of letters. No problem I thought I must be able to find something on the web to do that. But an extensive Google search turned up nothing, perhaps because it is difficult to describe.

At that point I decided that I could do it myself and set off to write a PHP script to do it and you can see the results here! Cut and paste some text into the box below and hit the submit button and you will see a very crude set of results and a great looking bar chart courtesy of Google Charts.

It’s not perfect, it will only work for Western European characters and only for words up to 20 characters in length but it does the trick – enjoy!

Oh, and this is the chart for this article

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