Text Summarizer

Summarize Text Online, Free

The Tools Kit’s free Text Summarizer condenses an article, essay, report or long paragraph into its most important sentences. Paste your text, choose how many sentences you want, and the summary appears instantly, along with a word count showing how much shorter it is than the original.

It is an extractive summarizer: instead of rewriting your content, it scores every sentence by how often its key words appear across the whole text and keeps the best ones, in their original order. Nothing is invented, and because the scoring runs in your browser, the text you paste is not uploaded anywhere.

How to Use the Text Summarizer

1. 1

   Paste your text

   Paste an article, essay, report, or any long passage into the Text to Summarize box.

2. 2

   Choose the summary length

   Drag the slider to set how many sentences the summary keeps, from 1 up to the number of sentences detected in your text. It starts at 3.

3. 3

   Read the summary

   The summary appears instantly as you type or move the slider, with the chosen sentences in their original order and a word count showing how much shorter it is.

4. 4

   Copy or clear

   Click Copy Summary to copy the result to your clipboard, or Clear to empty the box and start over.

You do not need an account, and there is no limit on how many texts you summarize. To check the length of the original before you start, paste it into the Word Counter.

How the Summarizer Picks Key Sentences

The summary is built in four steps, all of which you can predict from your own text:

1. Split into sentences. A new sentence starts after a period, question mark or exclamation mark that is followed by a space and a capital letter, a number, a quote or an opening parenthesis.
2. Count significant words. Every word is lowercased, and common English filler words (such as “the”, “is” and “with”) plus words shorter than three characters are ignored. The rest are counted across the whole text.
3. Score each sentence. A sentence’s score is the average count of its significant words. Sentences built from the words the text keeps returning to score highest.
4. Keep the top sentences in order. The highest-scoring sentences, up to the number set on the slider, are put back in the order they appeared and joined into the summary.

Because the score is an average rather than a total, a long sentence does not win just by being long; a short sentence packed with the text’s main terms can outrank it. Words are matched exactly, with no stemming, so “panel” and “panels” count as two different words.

Worked Example: Summarizing a Paragraph

Take this five-sentence, 42-word paragraph:

Solar panels convert sunlight into electricity. Panel efficiency has improved steadily over the past decade. Most home solar panels now convert about 20 percent of sunlight into electricity. Installation costs vary by region. Battery storage lets homes use solar electricity at night.

The most repeated significant words are “solar” and “electricity” (three times each), then “panels”, “convert” and “sunlight” (twice each). The first sentence uses five significant words with counts adding up to 12, for a score of 2.4. The third sentence scores 14 ÷ 7 = 2.0, the last 12 ÷ 8 = 1.5, and the second and fourth sentences 1.0 each.

Set the slider to 2 and the summary keeps sentences one and three: “Solar panels convert sunlight into electricity. Most home solar panels now convert about 20 percent of sunlight into electricity.” That is 19 words, down from 42, or 55% shorter.

Extractive vs. AI Summarizers

AI summarizers are abstractive: a language model reads the text and writes a new summary in its own words. That reads smoothly, but it can blur details, merge separate points, or state things the source never said. An extractive summarizer like this one only quotes sentences that are already in your text, so every line in the summary can be traced back to the original.

The trade-off is flow. Extracted sentences can begin with words like “This” or “However” that pointed back to a sentence that was left out, so read the summary once before you use it. If you need the key points in your own words, run the summary through the Paraphrasing Tool, then tidy the result with the Grammar Checker.

Tips for a Better Summary

• Keep end punctuation. Headings, bullet points and captions without a period are merged into the next sentence, so remove them or add punctuation before you paste.
• Watch abbreviations. “Dr. Smith” or “U.S. Army” can be read as a sentence break, which produces fragments in the summary.
• Summarize one topic at a time. On a document that covers several subjects, the most-discussed one dominates, so paste each section separately for balanced coverage.
• Use English text. The filler-word list is English and only unaccented letters are matched, so results in other languages are less reliable.
• Check readability afterward. Paste the summary into the Readability Checker to see its Flesch Reading Ease score, or into the Essay Checker if it is going into coursework.

Common uses

• Getting the gist of a long article or blog post before deciding whether to read it in full
• Condensing study material and lecture notes into key sentences for revision
• Drafting a short abstract or executive summary from a longer report
• Pulling the main points out of meeting notes or a pasted transcript
• Collecting key quotes from a source for a research paper, then crediting it with the Citation Generator
• Trimming a draft to fit a word or character limit, checked with the Character Counter

For more tools for drafting, checking and citing your writing, browse the Writing & Citation Tools from The Tools Kit.

Text summarizer terms explained

Frequently Asked Questions