Word Counter
Paste or type, and every count updates as you go. Nothing to submit.
Reading and speaking figures are estimates, based on 200 words a minute for reading and 130 for speaking aloud.
Processed in your browser. No signup.
What this tool does
Word Counter measures a piece of text as you write or paste it: words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, and rough reading and speaking times. There is no button to press — every number updates on each keystroke.
How to use it
- Paste your text into the box, or type directly into it.
- Read the counts underneath. They update immediately.
- Edit until the number you care about is where you need it.
Example
Pasting the two sentences “The meeting moved to Thursday. Please update the calendar.”gives 9 words, 58 characters, 2 sentences and 1 paragraph.
How each number is counted
Words
Text is split on spaces, which matches what a word processor does — sostate-of-the-art counts as one word. Scripts written without spaces between words, such as Chinese and Japanese, are segmented properly instead of being counted as a single long word.
Characters
Characters are counted the way people see them. An emoji with a skin tone, or a letter with a combining accent, counts as one character rather than the two or three code points it is built from.
Sentences
A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis. Decimal numbers such as 3.14 are not treated as sentence breaks, but abbreviations like Dr. are — so treat the sentence count as a close approximation rather than an exact figure.
Paragraphs
Blocks separated by at least one blank line count as separate paragraphs.
Reading and speaking time
Reading time assumes 200 words a minute, speaking time 130. Both vary with the reader, the subject and the language, so they are useful for planning a talk or a post, not for anything that has to be exact.
Useful cases
- Checking an essay or assignment against a word limit.
- Keeping a meta description, ad or social post inside its limit.
- Estimating how long a script will take to read aloud.
- Seeing how much a draft grew or shrank after an edit.
Privacy
Your text is counted by JavaScript running in your own browser. It is not uploaded to a server, saved, or included in analytics.