Word counter
Paste any text below to see live word, character, sentence, paragraph, and reading-time stats. Nothing is uploaded; everything runs in your browser.
What this tool does
The word counter takes any block of text and computes seven statistics: words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, estimated reading time, and estimated speaking time. The counters update as you type — there's no "calculate" button to press.
How the numbers are calculated
It's worth knowing what these counters actually count, because look-alike tools use different definitions and produce different numbers for the same input.
- Words are runs of non-whitespace characters separated by whitespace. "Don't" is one word; "ad hoc" is two. The first regex split is
/\s+/after trimming. - Characters includes everything — letters, digits, punctuation, spaces, and line breaks. This is the count Twitter, SMS, and most CMS limits use.
- Characters without spaces strips all whitespace before counting. Useful when a style guide gives a limit in "characters excluding spaces".
- Sentences are detected by a run of non-terminating characters followed by
.,!,?or…. This is imperfect: "Dr. Smith arrived." will be counted as two sentences. For most prose the count is within 5% of a human estimate. - Paragraphs are groups of text separated by at least one blank line, after trimming.
- Reading time uses the widely cited estimate of 238 words per minute, the median adult silent-reading speed measured by Brysbaert (2019).
- Speaking time uses 130 words per minute, the average rate for clear, prepared speech (TED talks average 163; conversational speech is faster).
When to use it
Writers use word counters to hit publication limits — newspapers and magazines specify maximum word counts, college essays come with strict bounds, and many freelance contracts pay by the word. Students use them for assignments that specify minimums. Speakers use the reading-time estimate to gauge how long a script will take to deliver.
For copywriting, the counter helps you stay inside platform limits: a tweet has 280 characters; an SMS message is typically 160; a Google meta description should aim for 150–160; an email subject line ideally fits in 60–70 characters.
Where it fails
Sentence detection is heuristic. Initialisms like "U.S." or "i.e." will inflate the sentence count. Languages without spaces between words — Chinese, Japanese, Thai — will produce a word count of 1 regardless of input length; for those languages, look at the character count instead.
Privacy
The text you paste is processed entirely in your browser using JavaScript. Nothing is sent to a server, nothing is logged, and nothing is stored after you close the tab. You can verify this by opening your browser's developer tools and watching the "Network" panel while you type.