Word Counter
Count words, characters, sentences and paragraphs as you type, with reading time and speaking time. Free, nothing is uploaded.
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Point your phone camera at the code to open this tool.
Count the words, characters, sentences and paragraphs in anything you paste, and see how long it would take to read aloud. Everything is measured in your browser, so drafts, client copy and unpublished work are never uploaded anywhere.
What this word counter measures
Six numbers update as you type, and each one uses a different rule. Knowing the rule is the difference between trusting a count and guessing at it.
Words are counted by splitting on whitespace. Any run of characters between two spaces counts as one word, so "state-of-the-art" is one word and "state of the art" is four.
Characters are counted as Unicode code points, not bytes and not UTF-16 units. That matters the moment your text contains an emoji or an accented letter: a single 😀 is one character here, even though it occupies four bytes in UTF-8 and two code units in JavaScript.
Sentences are counted by looking for runs of text that end in a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. This is the number that surprises people most, and the next section explains why.
Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line. Lines are the count of newline-separated rows.
Reading time assumes 225 words per minute, the figure commonly used for adults reading English silently. Speaking time assumes 130 words per minute, which is a comfortable presentation pace. Both round up and never report less than one minute.
Why two word counters disagree about the same text
If a submission system says 480 words and this page says 502, neither is broken. They are counting different things, and the difference is almost always one of four rules.
Hyphenated compounds. Splitting on whitespace treats "well-known" as one word. Tools that also split on hyphens make it two. For a 2,000-word essay with fifty hyphenated terms, that is a 50-word swing on its own.
Numbers and symbols. "2024" is a word by the whitespace rule. Some counters skip tokens with no letters; others count "&" as a word because it sits between two spaces.
Sentences without terminal punctuation. A heading, a list item or a bullet point that does not end in a full stop is not counted as a sentence here. Paste a document made mostly of headings and you will see a sentence count far below what you expected — that is the rule working, not a bug.
Smart quotes and dashes. Curly quotation marks, em dashes and non-breaking spaces are all distinct characters. A non-breaking space pasted from a PDF or a word processor is not the same character as a normal space, and a counter that only splits on " " will glue two words together.
The practical advice: check which rule the place that receives your text uses before you trim to fit a limit. If a form says 500 words and you are at 502, the fix is usually one hyphenated compound or one stray number, not a rewrite.
How to count words in a document
- Paste or type your textEverything recalculates on every keystroke — there is no submit button and nothing is sent anywhere.
- Read the headline numberThe large figure is the word count; the line under it carries characters and sentences.
- Open the detail rowsCharacters without spaces, paragraphs, lines, reading time and speaking time sit below the headline.
- Check the sentence count against your punctuationIf it looks low, scan for headings or list items that have no full stop at the end — they are deliberately not counted.
Worked examples
- Three sentences of ordinary prose (169 characters)
- 31 words · 3 sentences · 139 characters without spacesThe everyday case: words and sentences both look like what you would count by hand.
- "Quarterly Report\nRevenue grew steadily"
- 5 words · 0 sentences · 2 linesTwo lines of heading-style text with no full stop. The sentence count is zero because nothing ends in terminal punctuation.
- "First paragraph here.\n\nSecond paragraph follows."
- 6 words · 2 sentences · 2 paragraphs · 3 linesThe blank line is what makes it two paragraphs. A single newline would have given one paragraph and two lines.
What counts as a word, a character and a sentence
| Input | Words | Why |
|---|---|---|
| state-of-the-art | 1 | Splitting on whitespace keeps hyphenated compounds together |
| state of the art | 4 | Four separate tokens between spaces |
| 2024 | 1 | Digits are a token like any other |
| don’t | 1 | A curly apostrophe is an ordinary character, not a separator |
| hello world | 1 | A non-breaking space is not the space character, so the two words stick together |
| 😀 | 1 | Counted as one code point, not four bytes |
| 今天天气很好，我们一起去公园散步吧。 | 1 | Chinese has no spaces, so the whole clause is one token — see the limitation below |
Counting Chinese, Japanese and Korean text
This counter splits on whitespace, which is the correct rule for English and wrong for Chinese. A full Chinese sentence with no spaces in it counts as one word — the character count is the number that stays meaningful, because Chinese characters are counted one by one.
If you are working to a Chinese word limit, read the "characters" figure and ignore the word count. Editors in mainland China usually set limits in 字 (characters) anyway, so the character number is the one you actually need.
The same applies to Japanese and Korean, and to Thai, which does not put spaces between words either.
What this word counter does not do
It does not count pages. A page holds roughly 500 words in a manuscript format and roughly 300 in a printed book, but the real number depends on font size, margins and line spacing, so any tool that promises a page count is guessing.
It does not know your target limit. There is no "500 words" mode and no progress bar, because the limit lives in the form you are filling in, not in this tool.
It does not store anything. Nothing is uploaded and no history is kept, which is what makes it safe for unpublished drafts and client work — but it also means there is nothing to come back to. Copy the numbers you need.
It does not check grammar, spelling or readability. Those are separate tools, and mixing them into a counter is how you end up with a number you cannot explain.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How is the word count calculated?
- Text is split on whitespace, so any run of characters between spaces counts as one word.
- How accurate is the reading time?
- It assumes an average reading speed of 225 words per minute, which is typical for adults reading English.
- Is there a character limit?
- No. Because everything runs in your browser, the only limit is your device memory.