Word Counter

How to use the word counter

1. Type directly into the large box or paste text from a document, email or web page. Every figure updates on each keystroke.
2. Read the seven numbers above the buttons: words, characters, characters without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, estimated reading time and estimated speaking time.
3. Check the Top words list below to see which terms you repeat most. Use Copy text to put the contents on the clipboard, or Clear to empty the box and start over.

Exactly what is counted

• Words: every run of non-space characters. "well-known" is one word, "don't" is one word, and a lone dash surrounded by spaces counts as a word of its own, which can add a few to the total.
• Characters: the length of the text including spaces and line breaks, each line break counting as one. Some emoji and rare symbols are stored as two units internally, so they can count as 2.
• No spaces: the same text with all spaces, tabs and line breaks removed.
• Sentences: pieces of text ending in a full stop, exclamation mark or question mark that is followed by a space or the end of the text, plus any trailing piece without an ending mark. A run like "?!" or "..." counts as one ending. Abbreviations such as "Dr. Lee" are read as a sentence break, and a decimal like 3.5 is not, because no space follows the point.
• Paragraphs: blocks of text separated by at least one empty line. Lines that simply wrap to the next line without a blank line between them belong to the same paragraph.

Reading and speaking time

The tool divides the word count by 238 words per minute for silent reading and by 150 words per minute for speaking aloud. Under one minute the result is shown in seconds; from one minute up it is rounded to whole minutes.

Worked example: a 100-word note gives 100 / 238 = 0.42 minutes, shown as 25 seconds of reading, and 100 / 150 = 0.67 minutes, shown as 40 seconds of speaking. A 1,200-word article gives about 5 minutes of reading and 8 minutes of speaking. These are averages, so a dense technical text will take longer and a light story shorter. If you are timing a talk, add time for pauses, slides and questions.

Reading the Top words list

The list shows up to eight words with how often each appears. Words are lowercased, punctuation at the start and end is stripped, and anything shorter than three characters is ignored, so "it" or "of" never appear. Common longer words such as "the" and "and" are not filtered out, which means they often top the list in ordinary prose. It is most useful for spotting an overused word in a draft, or checking how often a keyword appears in a short page. It does not do keyword-density analysis or understand word forms: "write" and "writing" are separate entries.

Common uses

• Essays and assignments: stay inside a minimum or maximum word limit. Check whether your instructor counts headings, references or quotations, because this tool counts everything in the box.
• Social posts and ads: compare the character count against the limits listed above the FAQ before you publish.
• Meta titles and descriptions: paste the draft and check the length so it is less likely to be cut off in search results.
• Speeches and videos: turn a script length into an approximate running time.
• Editing: notice very long sentences by comparing the word count with the sentence count. Eighty words over two sentences means an average of forty words each, which is usually worth splitting.

Tips and limits

• Languages written without spaces, such as Chinese and Japanese, show a low word count because words are found by spaces. Use the character figure for those. Korean uses spaces, so words are counted normally.
• Other tools may report different numbers. Some count hyphenated words as two, some ignore standalone symbols, and some count characters differently. For a submission with a strict limit, use the counter the recipient specifies.
• Text pasted from word processors can include hidden spacing that changes the character count slightly.
• Nothing is saved. If you close or reload the page the box is emptied, so keep your own copy of anything important.

More questions