Word counter
Free online word counter. Paste or type text to count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and lines, plus reading and speaking time. Nothing is uploaded.
About Word counter
The word counter updates as you type or paste, showing words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines, and estimated reading and speaking time in one view.
It is built for essays with a word limit, blog posts, social media captions, translations billed per word and speeches that must fit a time slot. Counting happens in your browser, without uploading your draft to a conversion service. Website advertising requests are separate from the text-processing operation.
How to use Word counter
- Type or paste your text into the input box, or drop a .txt, .md, .html or other text file onto it.
- Read the live totals above the box: words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and lines.
- Check the reading and speaking time estimates to see how long the text takes to read silently or aloud.
- Edit the text and watch the counts update instantly, or select Reset to start again.
Features
- Counts words in any language that uses letters or digits, including accented Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Arabic and Devanagari scripts.
- Treats hyphenated words and contractions such as “well-known” and “don’t” as one word.
- Counts Unicode code points instead of UTF-16 code units; combining sequences and complex emoji may contain several counted points.
- Estimates reading time at 238 words per minute and speaking time at 150 words per minute.
- Handles text files up to 2 MB, with no sign-up and no upload.
Common uses
- Staying within the word limit of an essay, application or assignment.
- Checking that a meta description, caption or ad text fits a platform’s character limit.
- Estimating the cost of a translation or copywriting job priced per word.
- Timing a speech, presentation or video script before recording.
Tips
- Paragraphs are separated by a blank line, so single line breaks inside a paragraph do not add to the paragraph count.
- For character limits on social platforms, compare against the “Characters” total, which includes spaces.
- Sentence totals use common punctuation and newline patterns, not a language-specific grammar model.
Frequently asked questions
How does the word counter decide what a word is?
A word is a run of letters or digits. Hyphens and apostrophes inside a word, as in “e-mail” or “it’s”, keep it as one word. Punctuation and spaces only separate words.
Does it work for languages other than English?
It recognizes letters and numbers from Unicode scripts, including Spanish, Russian, Armenian, Arabic and Hindi. Word boundaries remain a heuristic; continuous text without spaces, such as many Chinese or Japanese passages, is often better compared using the character count.
How is reading time calculated?
The fixed estimate divides words by 238 words per minute for silent reading and 150 words per minute for speaking. Real pace depends on vocabulary, the reader and pauses; rehearse a spoken script for a reliable final duration.
Why are there two character counts?
“Characters” counts everything, including spaces and line breaks. “Without spaces” removes all whitespace, which is what some forms and translation agencies use.
Is my text stored or uploaded?
No. The counts are calculated in your browser and the text is cleared when you leave the page.
Is my input uploaded?
Tools run in your browser. Files, text and results are not uploaded to our servers and are cleared when you leave the tool.
Your privacy comes first
Tools run in your browser. Files, text and results are not uploaded to our servers and are cleared when you leave the tool.